


On Your Right

by Nyxelestia



Series: The 14,000,606th Timeline [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Everyone lives, Fix-It, Gen, Natasha Romanov Lives, POV Outsider, Recovery, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Tony Stark Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-07 09:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21456094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyxelestia/pseuds/Nyxelestia
Summary: “-three-”Bucky reminded himself of all the years of fighting Steve had never signed up for, everything he’d lost, and would regain when the time-travel platform stayed empty.“-two-”Bucky braced himself, knowing that Steve wasn’t going to show up.“-one.”…so Bucky was understandably taken aback when he did.Covered in blood.Holding a body.And yelling, “Someone get a doctor,NOW!”Steve set out to replace all the Infinity Stones in their proper places in the time-stream, promising himself that once he finished this last mission, he would return to his own home in the post-WWII era for good.That...doesn't quite go to plan.
Relationships: Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers - Relationship, Steve Rogers & Avengers Team, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Series: The 14,000,606th Timeline [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546714
Comments: 34
Kudos: 248
Collections: Marvel Big Bang 2019





	1. Act I, Part 1 - The Snap (Steve), Avengers Compound Battlefield, 2023

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brokenEisenglas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenEisenglas/gifts), [Escalus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Escalus/gifts).

> Thank you to my wonderful artist, **brokeneisenglas**, and my beta, **Escalus**!
> 
> If you are seeing this work on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019, please be sure to come back tomorrow for the art. :)

Act I, Part 1: The Snap  
**Steve Rogers**  
Avengers Compound Battlefield  
**2023**

* * *

“I can do this all day,” Steve ground out, all but spitting at Thanos’ face.

“Of course you can,” the condescending bastard replied, calm tone belied by the ferocity with which he swung his Titan blade at the remaining shards of Steve’s shield. “The eternal soldier, are you not?”

Steve rolled out of the way of the next strike, the blade cracking the concrete where Steve had just been. Shooting up to his feet, he barely dodged the next blow. Thor’s hammer felt simultaneously light as a feather and heavy as a leaden weight, but Steve lifted it with ease.

“Can you really do this all day?” Thanos asked. “Or are you just incapable of doing anything else?”

“Like you have a right to ask that!” Steve snarled, before throwing the hammer like he used to see Thor do all the time.

Thanos took the blow, rolling back with it like Steve used to roll with the punches before Rebirth.

And like Steve always had, he got back up to his feet again.

_Un_like Steve, though, it wasn’t the guy who’d thrown the blow he had to face.

“_You!_” Wanda raged, when she landed between Steve and Thanos. “You took _everything_ from me.”

Thanos frowned. “I don’t even know who you are.”

Steve’s spine practically shook in time with the power that made Wanda’s hands glow red — and presumably her eyes as well, not that Steve could see with her back to him.

“You will,” she promised.

He wanted to help her — do what? What good was super-strength in _this_ fight? He whirled around at the loud footsteps behind him, only for Sam to come right out of the other side of Steve’s vision, stabbing the giant beast with his wings. In the distance, he could see Tony and Thor standing back to back, triangulating with Bruce.

“_Cap!_” he heard Clint’s voice crackling in his ear-piece. “_What do you want me to do with this damn thing?_”

“Get those stones as far away as possible!” Steve started to order.

“_No!_” Bruce countered, voice booming and a little echo-y, like the Hulk’s voice had always been over the comms. “_We need to get them back where they came from!_”

“_No way to get them back,_” Tony chimed in. “_Thanos destroyed the quantum-tunnel._”

Kneeling behind a slab of concrete — that he was pretty sure used to be one of the bathrooms, judging by the tiles — Steve frowned at the odd distortion of the background noise. His eyes widened as he realized it must mean there was a crack somewhere in Tony’s helmet, for the noise to get through like that.

All the Avengers were cracking apart.

(If they hadn’t been cracked apart already, like Vision’s mask in Thanos’ grasp, or Natasha’s bones on a planet hundreds of millions of miles away from home.)

“_Hold on!_”

…well, not all the Avengers.

“_That wasn’t our only time-machine!_”

Looking around, Steve mentally slapped himself upside the head. The original team might be cracked apart, but the Avengers were far, _far_ bigger than them, now — as Scott’s voice in his comms just reminded him.

When Scott triggered that annoying horn on his van, and one of the more surreal moments of Steve’s life was listening to the _La cucaracha_ horn while watching a squad of Dora Milaje and a trio of Sanctum sorcerers tear through a battalion of Thanos’ alien Outriders.

“Scott,” Steve asked, peering over the slab of formerly-bathroom-floor. “How long you need to get that thing working?”

“Maybe ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.

They could do that.

Steve found cover with a group of Asgardian warriors, protecting their new home planet with a fervor that only those who’d _lost_ their home could truly understand.

(Did Steve? He’d lost his home, except not really, he’d woken up in the 21st just a few blocks away from his neighborhood and it might as well have been another planet, too-)

“RAIN FIRE!” Thanos boomed across the battlefield.

The fact that one of Thanos’ own lieutenants objected did not bode well.

It didn’t.

Crouching under some of the Sorcerers’ shields, Steve wondered why Thanos hadn’t just opened with that. He was grateful, nonetheless, that Thanos held off this long.

Long enough for the Avengers’ namesake to come careening in from the stars and save all their asses.

Captain Marvel floated over Thanos’ falling ship. All around Steve, he could hear the whooping and cheers of the Wakandans, the Asgardians, the Ravagers, and every Avenger — new and old, the former cheering with bright eyes and the latter all clinging together in the center of the battlefield.

Though the good cheer didn’t last long — the ship took out part of the dam as it landed, and only Strange kept them all from being washed away, protecting everyone on the battlefield…

…technically, including Thanos’ forces.

“Everyone, find something to hold onto!” Steve ordered down the comms. “And tell everyone else around you the same!” While Shuri could patch in the Wakandans into Avenger communications on the fly, complying with Asgardian or Ravager tech would’ve taken time they didn’t have, and the Sorcerers didn’t use comms at all.

Which is why he had to tell Pepper to convey his plan to Doctor Strange in person. As she flew, Steve ran towards pile of rubble on which stood Starlord and Thanos’ daughters, doing his own part to communicate battle plans.

Everyone did. All around him, he could see Wakandans and newer Avengers shouting Steve’s order at their own side. Some of Thanos’ lieutenants overheard, but didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late.

By the time Strange dropped his magical hold on the lake water, the flood was coming in too fast for Thanos’ forces to find cover.

They were drenched immediately, but at least Steve’s people either found cover or found someone to hold onto. He could see Tony and Thor working together to hold up Bruce, Clint dangling off the hulking man’s shoulders. Pepper swooped in to rescue that kid from Queens, Valkyrie had a pair of Jabari warriors clinging to her horse, and Wanda stood in a line with the Sorcerers to create a magical barrier against the watery onslaught.

Then a wave crashed over Steve and his compatriots.

“Captain!” Nebula shouted over the spray, her bionic hand dug right into twisted rebar whilst her flesh-hand grabbed on his arm, sliding in under the broken shield to hold onto him directly. Steve tried to ask her what she wanted, only for lake water and aquatic fauna to slap him in the face.

He saw the bright flash of Danvers shooting straight down, fist aimed at the ground, at _Thanos_, before the water sucked him down again.

Steve didn’t see what happened next, but he sure _felt_ it. Captain Marvel’s unstoppable force met Thanos’ immovable object, and the concussive blast sent metaphorical and literal shockwaves through the flood. Blinking through the darkness and murk, Steve barely kept a hold on Nebula as the literal slab of concrete skimmed across the water.

It wasn’t until they slammed into the twisted remains of the hangar doors that Steve could get his bearings, get to his feet, and get a broad look at the battlefield again.

The Avengers had never been a particularly disciplined unit, even before multiple other armies joined in, but they’d always been adaptive and creative, and able to mold around others…or make others mold around their tactics. While it hadn’t been Steve’s order, he approved off the spiraling cliffs of ice forming as the Sorcerers strategically froze parts of the deluge, while still leaving the rest of it to wash away Thanos’ forces.

Whether Danvers had missed or Thanos had dodged, Steve didn’t know. All he really did know is that she was now putting her strength into pushing back a hundred-foot-tall section of the damn before it could fall and crush their own people, while the rest of the first Avengers stood alone with Thanos in the crater her strike had formed, their backs to each other and the Gauntlet.

The Gauntlet lay cracked in the middle between Thanos and Steve’s team; Danvers’ blow had scattered the stones around it, but hadn’t broken them or the Gauntlet itself.

Strange made a gesture towards Tony. Steve couldn’t see what it was…

…but he could see the way Tony looked from the gauntlet, to his own metal-gloved hand.

“Tony, no!” Steve snapped, as he realized what Tony was considering. “Look at what the stones did to Bruce, they’ll _kill_ you! They-”

A hand and a body wrapped around Steve’s shoulder, and Starlord’s face pressed in right next to Steve’s. But the man was neither trying to cop a feel nor collapse against him, but was looking intently at Steve’s ear-piece.

“Grab onto him!” Starlord yelled right into Steve’s ear. Steve flinched, but it was hardly the worst he’d felt today. Starlord looked at Gamora. “We’ve done it before. The Power Stone alone should’ve killed me, but you and me and the Guardians held onto each other _and it didn’t_!”

Oh, thank god.

“Guys,” Steve said, pulling away from Starlord a little. “Did you get all that? I’m coming!”

“_Yes,_” Thor said. Clint lowered his bow as he shifted his weight forward, Bruce crouched for a leap, and Tony and Thor dug their heels back in their respective ways just before flight.

“_But you better get here fast_,” Tony said, as the four of them shot toward the Gauntlet in a race against Thanos.

Steve didn’t need to be told twice. He twisted in place, taking a dive over the edge of the concrete slab that had just saved him-

-then snarled when his torn clothes twisted into the rebar that had helped hold him to it.

He managed to yank away, but lost his belt’s stash of bandages, spare clips, ammo, compass-

The compass!

“_Cap!_” Clint snapped into the comm, and Steve could see the four guys, each holding a stone, save for the Power and Mind Stones settling into Tony’s glove. “_We could use a little help!_”

“I’m on my way!”

Even as he spoke, he could hear a vibration that warped its way across the battle field as Tony slammed the Space Stone into its place.

The old newspaper picture of Peggy seemed horrifically out of place, bouncing around the alien rubble. Steve reached for it, but the impact of Bruce latching in the Time Stone sent it tumbling right out of his reach.

Then Thor getting the Reality Stone into place sent bouncing right out of Steve’s _sight_, behind some twisted metal. Thunder erupted, Thor blasting lightning down to throw Thanos off as Clint ran toward them.

Steve found and snatched up the compass, and ran in time with Clint. He had the compass firmly in his grip as Clint pressed the Soul Stone into place.

The shock-wave of all the stones finally coming back together threw _everyone_ back away from them…save for the men actually holding onto the Gauntlet itself, and Tony wearing it.

Steve ran.

Natasha’s sacrifice made manifest was the final piece. Steve could feel the power building around Tony and the team deep in his bones, feel the power sparking across his skin, and making every hair stand on end.

Steve ran.

He could see Thanos sitting up and staring with incredulity from across the crater, as Tony positively glowed with all the power coursing through him. The glow spread to the others, simmering over Bruce’s already burnt arm, wrapping around Clint, and outshining Thor’s thunder. The light nearly blinded Steve, as he got so close he could taste that power and the smell drowned out the smoke and blood all around him.

Steve ran, and leapt, his hand outstretched toward his team-

Tony Snapped.


	2. Act I, Part 2 - What Did It Cost? (Tony), Celestial Waters, 2023

Act I, Part 2: What Did It Cost?  
**Tony Stark**  
Celestial Waters of the Soul Stone  
**2023**

* * *

This wasn’t the first time Tony opened his eyes while laid out flat on his back after losing consciousness in the middle of a battle for the fate of the world as he knew it.

But this one might just be the weirdest.

Pushing himself up, he frowned at the splashing — had the lake water flooded the field again?

Except when he looked up, he wasn’t on the battlefield anymore. He was…he was…

He had no idea where he was.

All around him, water stretched on forever — literally. He could see no land nor end in sight, with nothing between him and the uniformly twilight horizon, save for Thor, Bruce, and Clint-shaped lumps that were also splashing themselves upright.

Wait, where the hell was Steve?

Thor and Clint looked just as confused as Tony felt, but Bruce’s eyes snapped wide open in recognition.

“This is what I was about to tell you!” he cried out, looking at the other three. “When I snapped with the Gauntlet, this is where I was, what I saw. And when I did, I saw…I saw…”

“Back so soon?”

Snapping his gaze toward the voice, Tony could’ve sworn he had shrapnel in his heart all over again.

“_Romanoff?!_” he cried out.

Arching her eyebrow at Bruce, to whom she’d spoken, Natasha Romanoff looked as young and bright as the day the team had met her for the first time, when they’d faced the Chitauri all those years ago.

Where the guys were all sitting _in_ the water, she seemed to be standing on it. Strangely, and unlike them, the water also did not reflect her, yet somehow seemed to have a shadow under her nonetheless. Even more strangely, she wasn’t wearing the quantum armor she’d died in, but her old field tactical suit. Her blond tips were gone, hair short and red as the day they’d all faced Thanos’ forces together the first time — right down to those terrible old Widow’s Bites, from before Tony had upgraded them.

“Yeah,” Bruce answered, with a slightly dazed nod. “I guess I am.”

From Tony’s right, Clint bolted to his feet, then stumbled and fell to his knees again as he tried to get to Tasha. The water splashed all around him and over his ankles, though didn’t even seem to get halfway up his shins as he reached out to her.

“Tasha,” Clint said, voice wet as he grasped her young hand with his own burnt one. “You’re…you’re dead…so wait, does that mean _we’re_ dead, now, too?”

Nat laughed and shook her head. “You’re not dead, yet — though not for the lack of trying on all your parts.”

“Hey!” Tony protested, with an indignation borne more of habit than genuine protest. “The plan was working perfectly until Thanos showed up.”

“Technically, it _did_ work perfectly,” Bruce insisted, also getting up. Strangely, despite being having so much more bulk than Clint, the water only seemed to come up to his ankles, too. He only had to take two steps to reach her side, and she used her free hand to grab his damaged one. If Bruce minded her clutching his Gauntlet burns, he didn’t show it. “It’s just afterward that’s kind of a problem.”

“But it seems you’ve solved it,” Nat said, turning her gaze from Bruce to Tony. “Did you do it?”

Under any other circumstances, Tony would’ve rolled his eyes and answered with something sarcastic, just to be contrary.

These weren’t ordinary circumstances, though.

He nodded dumbly, trying to stand. The pain he was sure he was supposed to be in seemed distant and muted, but he couldn’t seem to stand up right. He got halfway up, before his entire right side seemed to just collapse under him. Only Thor’s grip on Tony with _his_ good arm kept Tony from face-planting back in the water.

Thor looped Tony’s good arm through his own, casually pulling Tony to his feet and practically dragging him over to Natasha.

“W-wait,” Tony said, looking around and looking back. “Where’s Steve? He was just…he just…”

“He _just_ missed us,” Bruce realized, voiced tinged with numb horror.

Tony’s throat went tight as realization sunk in. “He doesn’t…he isn’t gonna see you?”

Natasha didn’t answer. Instead, she tugged the two hands she held upward, so that Clint and Bruce held her shoulders. Hands free, she reached out to Tony and Thor.

“That’s why I need you to pass on a message to him,” she said, as they approached.

“Anything,” Thor promised, holding out his own Gauntlet-burnt arm to her. He flinched when she touched it, but didn’t let go or try to throw her off. “What do you need us to tell him?”

She opened her mouth and spoke, right as her hand other hand grabbed onto the charred remains of Tony’s.

And then they fell, dropping down right through the water, and into the dark, starry voids below.

~*~

In the middle of the battlefield ruins of what used to be the Avengers’ compound, Tony woke up just as a few hundred pounds of desperate super soldier collided right into them.

Though to be honest, Tony barely noticed through the pain.

Groaning, he collapsed against a pile of rubble, but in this plane of existence, the adrenaline was pumping again.

Through dark spots in his vision and excruciation all down his right side, he could still see the battlefield all around him…

…including all the dust.

Coughing up blood, Tony couldn’t tear his gaze away as the remainder of Thanos’ forces started to turn to dust. After five years of nightmares of Peter dissolving in his arms, Tony refused to look away from the sight.

A Leviathan that had once crushed dozens of New Yorkers just by flicking its tail now didn’t even knock Rocket over when flying right toward him, collapsing into dust before its jaws snapped shut around the raccoon. The preachy telekinetic seemed to turn to dust in time with an exhale just before he could crush General Okoye in rubble and rebar. A dozen Chitauri vanished inside the bubble of red light of Wanda’s power, and Peter tumbled into nothingness when the Outrider whose back he’d been clinging too disappeared under his hands.

Vindication never felt so sweet, and this was the first victory in almost eight years that _didn’t_ feel hollow.

When Thanos sat, exhausted and resigned, Tony grinned.

He was pretty sure his own bloody smile was the last thing Thanos saw, before turning to dust.

After, after nothing remained of Thanos’ army save alien corpses and broken spaceships, the adrenaline plummeted.

Tony collapsed.

Sprawled across the ground, he started to lose track of time and people. He tried to keep track of the field as best as he could, though. Tony had only wanted the _threats_ gone, he hadn’t eliminated everything. While Thanos’ living forces had died, the field was still covered in dead Outrider and Chitauri bodies. Thankfully, there seemed to be very few human or humanoid bodies. No surprise there; Chitauri and Outriders were little more than expendable bodies for Thanos, and had no capacity to fight for and with each other, or to defend each other.

Off to the side, he could see Thor arguing with Valkyrie as an Asgardian waved her hands over his burnt arm, while Clint and Bruce practically glowed red under Wanda’s power as the field medics tried to look them over.

The next time Tony blinked, Pepper crouched over him, and he had so many questions, but no voice to ask them with.

He tried, anyway, but must not have gotten very far.

“Please rest, Mr. Stark,” Peter insisted, and where had he come from? “From _space_, remember? I told you about Doctor Strange’s yellow sparkly things?”

Tony must’ve accidentally said that aloud.

“You did, Mr. Stark.”

“They’re not ‘_sparkly things_’_._” Thank god Strange cut in before Tony could lose track of his own mouth even more. Despite the magician’s claims, yellow streaks and shapes indeed started to appear with the movement of his hands over Tony’s body.

Over them all stood Steve.

And Tony swallowed desperately, around his useless voice, because Steve needed to know, needed to hear her words.

Steve frowned at him.

“Whose words?” he asked.

Tony tried to reach up for Steve, then flinched as he realized it was with the hand wearing the Gauntlet. Peter tried to get it off, but even the slightest tug had Tony recoiling.

Whether Tony had tried to get away from everyone or just simply moved too much in his pain, he didn’t know. What he _did_ know was the familiar feeling of gentle pressure on his shoulder, holding onto him and holding him down in equal measures.

These days, Tony knew plenty of people strong enough to hold onto or hold down his armor. Despite that, there was no mistaking the familiarity of this hold.

“S-Steve,” Tony finally managed to ground out, through the pain and the noise of all the people yelling around the battlefield. “She said…she said…”

“Tony, _who_ said?” Steve asked, yanking off the shard of shield from his arm to give Strange more room to work on Tony without letting go. “Who said what?” 

“N’tasha.”

Steve jerked back as if Tony had slapped him, face more devastated than that awful day in Siberia.

Still, the man was nothing if not a soldier, and managed to force out, “You saw her?”

Tony wasn’t completely sure if his head actually moved when he tried to nod, but Steve seemed to understand him anyway.

“What…what did she say?”

Fighting to keep his eyes open, Tony said the last words Natasha had shared before sending them back to his plane of reality, that he wasn’t sure if he _heard_ so much as felt in his bones and his iron and his heart:

“‘On your right, this time.’”

Steve frowned, looking as confused as Tony felt — which was unfortunate, because Tony had no idea what it meant, either.

Almost by habit, every scientist and engineer’s never ending thirst for knowledge and understanding, Tony looked to his own right, despite the fact it wouldn’t mean anything. Then he turned his head in the other direction, and still saw nothing — or at least, nothing he thought Nat could be referring Steve too. Carol had joined Wanda in keeping Bruce down, as one of Strange’s Sorcerers joined the medic in looking over him, while a bunch of aliens tended to their own…what had Nebula called them? Ravagers?

Tony turned back to Steve, to ask if he knew, only to realize Steve hadn’t followed Tony askance at all. His gaze was locked firmly on something in his hand.

In his _right_ hand, and oh good, Steve must’ve known what Nat was talking about, after all.

So why was he crying?

Tony wanted to ask, but then Peter finally managed to pry the gauntlet off, and blissful darkness overtook Tony.


	3. Act I, Part 3 - Time Machine Blood (Bucky), Avengers Compound, 2023

Act I, Part 3: Time Machine Blood  
**Bucky Barnes**  
Half a Mile From Avengers Compound Ruins  
**2023**

* * *

Packing up the case for Steve’s final time-travel mission, Bucky marveled that the half a dozen little rocks before him damn near destroyed the _universe_.

Shaking his head, he made sure all the old vials of replacement Pym particles were secure — at least 1970 was Steve’s first stop — before closing the case.

At the console for the time-machine, Scott peered over Nebula’s shoulder as she typed and fiddled. From one brainwashed, tortured, and partially cybernetic assassin to another, Bucky was fairly certain that Nebula was secretly considering the many ways she could kill Scott right then for bugging her.

Neither of them worried Bucky. No matter how much Scott bugged Nebula, Bucky doubted she would actually kill him.

Mostly.

Bucky looked to the platform itself, just in time to hear Sam remind Steve, “You know if you want, I could come with you.

Once again, Steve shook his head. “You’re a good man, Sam. This one’s on me, though.”

Bucky fought down the urge to snort, a sound he knew would be nothing but bitter. He reminded himself of everything Steve had sacrificed, had gone through in the last five years, in their _lives_. Steve deserved peace and rest, and could Bucky ever really give that to him?

Still, thinking that he wasn’t enough for Steve was a world away from _knowing_ it. Steve, himself, proved it with his plan to go back and live with Peggy.

“Hey, Cap!” Scott called out, either finally noticing Nebula’s irritation, or just getting bored. “You sure you gonna be okay without your shield?”

Whatever her disgruntlement with Scott, Nebula looked up in agreement. “Harley and I have already started repairing it in Tony’s old lab,” she said. “We only need a few more weeks-”

“No,” Steve cut her off. “We already talked about this. Everyone wants these stones out of our timeline as fast as possible. I don’t need the shield badly enough to wait.”

Unbeknownst to them, Steve didn’t need the shield at all, not if he really committed to retirement.

(Every time the bitter part of Bucky hated the realization that Steve wouldn’t go and rescue him from HYDRA, he reminded himself of all the people he killed — and just how delicate the timeline was, the sheer size of the butterfly effect. Bucky wasn’t worth half the life in the universe, _no one_ was, and Steve knew it.)

Bucky swallowed down the lump in his throat when Steve finally stood before him.

What was there left to say? They’d spoken so much before, at length, the night before — Steve’s plans and pleading and apologies, Bucky’s guilt and grief…did they have any words left?

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back,” Steve said, and wasn’t that just a knife in the goddamn gut, because Steve wasn’t _coming_ back.

But maybe that was the point. Of course Steve’s goodbye would be telling Bucky to stay safe and take care of himself, in the best way either of them knew how.

“How can I?” Bucky asked, because this might be the last time they ever spoke, and he couldn’t waste it on tears that he could shed even after Steve was gone. “You’re taking all the stupid with you.”

If Steve felt Bucky shaking as they embraced, he was kind enough not to say a word.

“I’m gonna miss you, buddy,” Bucky said, internally cursing how hoarse his voice was.

Steve smiled sadly. “It’s gonna be okay, Buck,” he lied.

Then he turned and walked away.

Bucky’s fists clenched in his pockets as he watched Steve step onto the little platform, and tap his wrist.

As a child, Bucky had spent hours wrestling himself and his sisters into Depression era clothing, and his adulthood was layered with uniforms from the army and then the SSR.

Somehow, it seemed like a horrible joke from the universe that Bucky’s sisters and their children and even some of their grandchildren were long dead, yet here Bucky stood to watch quantum armor wrap around Steve of its own accord, with nary but a simmer of technological light as it moved around him.

“How long is this gonna take?” Sam asked, as the machine started whirring and the claw-like pillars started lighting up.

“For him, as long as he needs,” Nebula answered, not looking up from the control panel.

“For us,” Scott added, stepping back from it. “Five seconds. Ready, Cap?”

Steve picked up Thor’s hammer, and nodded as the helmet formed around his head. “You bet.”

“Going quantum,” Scott announced, as Nebula finished typing whatever it was she needed to do. “In three…two…one…”

With a series of _beep-beeps_ incongruent with the gravity of time travel and taking Steve away from his life back to the one he disappeared, the platform and the clearing around it jittered and shook once as Steve seemed to condense and vanish in a simmer of light.

“And now, returning,” Nebula said, pressing down on something while shrewdly observing the platform.

“In five,” Scott started, looking between the control panel and the platform. “Four…”

Stomach curling into a little ball of acid, Bucky rolled his shoulders back and held his head up high, ready to give all the explanations Steve had asked Bucky to give on his behalf.

“-three-”

Bucky reminded himself of all the years of fighting Steve had never signed up for, everything he’d lost, and would regain when the time-travel platform stayed empty.

“-two-”

Bucky braced himself, knowing that Steve wasn’t going to show up.

“-one.”

…so Bucky was understandably taken aback when he did.

Covered in blood.

Holding a body.

And yelling, “Someone get a doctor, _NOW_!”


	4. Act II, Part 1 - Space Stone (Howard), New Jersey SHIELD Complex, 1970

Act II, Part 1: The Space Stone  
**Howard Stark**  
New Jersey SHIELD Facility  
**1970**

* * *

In the quiet confines of his private car, Howard was still ruminating over where the hell he’d met that new physicist when the emergency radio crackled to life.

“Mr. Stark, this is Code RTB, clearance level Alpha,” the operator reported. In the driver’s seat, Jarvis’ eyebrows rose up, but he otherwise didn’t react as he obligingly veered the car to the edge of the rural road so he could turn it around. “You are needed at the facility; there has been a break-in.”

Frowning, Howard leaned forward as Jarvis passed back the receiver. “Where at?”

“Preliminary reports suggest entry into primary and secondary offices-”

Suddenly, the sound of clamoring and clattering and heavy breathing filled the car.

Followed by Hank Pym’s voice:

“Stark,” he gasped out. “My particles are missing, and the Tesseract is _gone_!”

Heart leaping up into his throat, he looked up at Jarvis.

His right-hand man didn’t even need to be told to step on it — he was already pressing down on the pedal and taking them back as fast as he could.

Still, they _barely_ made it back to the facility before the final lock-down procedure, shutting down the entire base and making sure no one got in or out.

It was almost a solid hour of re-issuing security credentials and going over reports. In the mail room, Hank explained everything: the phone call that said mail room had no record nor memory of, no package waiting for him once he got there, and coming back to find vials of Pym particles _missing_. As they listened, Peggy skimmed over entry logs.

And then the security receptionist, Shirley Bennett, started reiterating her descriptions of the suspicious persons in the elevator.

Howard hadn’t felt this kind of cold combination of rage and fear since listening to the recording of Steve’s final words over the radio at the end of WWII.

“…and the hippie beard was what caught my attention, why would a hippie be in this kind of facility? It was definitely a Mongo Jerry beard-”

“Was he wearing a dark gray coat?”

The MPs, Bennett, Hank, Peggy, and half a dozen other scientists and soldiers turned to look at Howard, seeming surprised at his hoarse voice.

Miss Bennett blinked in surprise, but slowly nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “He was, and a-”

“Blue shirt?”

“-blue shirt…” she trailed off when she realized they’d spoken in unison. “White-blue. Yes. Mr. Stark, how did you know?”

Howard should answer, he knew he should answer, but all he could hear in his head was that thieving, conniving voice telling him, _it’s going to be okay_-

When his shout filled the room, everyone jerked back, flinching at the sound of his knuckles hitting the reinforced concrete wall.

His chest heaved in impotent rage as he stared at the drops of blood splattered around that point of impact.

“Howard!” Peggy snapped, shoving the logbooks at an MP as she strode over to him. “What’s the matter with you? Get a hold of yourself-”

“I _met him_,” Howard ground out. “We _talked_, for several minutes! We chatted about fatherhood, and children, and he told me he had a little girl, and- and-”

Performing for investors or politicians or fans was easy, and Howard never had a problem finding the right words for an act. But when he needed them most, he never forgot why he was an _engineer_ by trade, rather than a poet.

Gentle fingertips brushed over his wrist, and Howard yanked away from them, fist up to punch that sucker in the-

Peggy only raised a cool, unimpressed eyebrow at him.

“He’s _gone_, Howard,” she reminded him.

He deflated.

“He used me.”

She nodded, and offered no platitudes. Her sympathy was limited, yet genuine when she tsked over his bleeding, busted knuckles.

“We’ll need to take you to the infirmary for this,” she started — then rolled her eyes when Howard shook his head.

“I didn’t break any bones. I’m fine.”

“The bone might not be broken, but the skin certainly is! At least some first aid?”

Peggy looked over to the front desk of the mail room, but the clerk shook his head. “Lo siento, Directora, but we don’t keep a first aid kit here.”

“I’ve got one?” Miss Bennett offered, wincing a little as she eyed a drop of blood trickling down the back of Howard’s palm. Howard hoped she didn’t feel guilty — if this guy could fool _him_, then she certainly shouldn’t feel bad about them fooling her. “I can bring it here.”

“This fuss really isn’t necessary,” Howard tried, but didn’t try again after Peggy’s glare.

Still, she seemed to at least sense his slight embarrassment, for she turned to Miss Bennett and ordered, “Bring it to my office, please. We’ll need to start the process to inform various department liaisons, and the codes and paperwork for it are all in there.”

If anyone else noticed the transparency of her ploy to get him some privacy, they were all kind enough not to say anything about it. Hank went with the MP’s to comb over the hallways between the mailroom and his lab, Miss Bennett trotted off in the other direction for the kit, and Peggy dragged Howard up to her office with a grip that looked nowhere near as firm as it actually was.

Despite that, he wasn’t surprised when he found himself engulfed in a hug as soon as Peggy’s door closed.

“I’m so sorry they used that against you,” she murmured and didn’t say anything when he shuddered in her embrace.

Thankfully, she didn’t hold him for long. After only a moment, she gently tugged him over to her desk and pushed him into her chair. He sat back like the limp noodle he felt like as she scrounged up a napkin from somewhere, and dampened it with some of her drinking water she hid in an old wine bottle for those particularly paranoid days where even the mess hall was suspect.

He clenched his teeth, but managed not to hiss or make any noise as she started cleaning up the blood and dabbing at the breaks in his skin. As she leaned against her desk, his hand resting in her lap under her practical lamp, Howard lost himself squinting at the faded label on the bottle.

“1943?”

Peggy didn’t startle at his question, but her sharp gaze demanded he explain himself. He didn’t have to say a word, merely nodding at the bottle label he was trying to decipher.

“Bordeaux Rosé 1943,” she answered, turning her attention back to his busted knuckles.

Howard frowned. “Didn’t we drink it all in 1944?” It had been a high spot during a low time in France, enough so that even Denier got over how young it’d been at the time to drink it with them.

Peggy shook her head. “Steve and I had saved a bottle for…for after the war.”

His gaze flickering between the _water_-dampened napkin and the bottle, he asked, “So after the war, you…?”

“Got sozzled with his memory,” she answered, prim posture belying the waver in her voice. She paused in her fussing over his fist to stare at the old wine bottle. “When I woke up, my wine was all gone, but so were my ghosts.”

“Your _ghosts_?” Howard asked, eyebrows raised with his incredulity.

“My very drunken hallucination gave me some wise words of wisdom,” she continued. “Which I try to live by every day.”

“And those were…?”

Peggy smiled, her lips turned upright but her eyes downcast in old grief.

“That he’s not going to be here to march forward and live on,” she answered. “So we need to do it for him.”

That sounded like something Steve would say, all right, even if not necessarily to Howard or any of the other boys. Peggy’s wine-drunk fantasy was spot-on, and Howard wondered how Peggy _wasn’t_ an alcoholic, if that’s what her boozy brain came up with.

For a moment, she seemed as lost in the label as Howard had been moments ago. Before he needed to say anything, though, she shook her head and turned her attention back to his now-clean hand, dabbing at imaginary spots of blood.

After decades of friendship, Howard could read volumes in her lulls, and this one left him with many, many questions — most of which he couldn’t voice out loud, but a few that he could.

They were both saved from Howard’s insatiable curiosity by the arrival of Miss Bennett with the first aid kit.

For a few moments, the office was quiet as Peggy rummaged through the small get for some antiseptic wipes, ignoring Howard’s exaggerated hissing as she cleaned up the wounds, then covered them in some strong bandages. Bennett bustled around them, collecting the napkin and wrappers, scanning the desk for any missed detritus of Peggy’s care.

Until eyes widened when she saw the photograph on Peggy’s desk.

Howard and Peggy shared an old smile, that moment when someone realizes the picture on her disk isn’t of a random, skinny boy, but Captain America from _before_ he was Captain America. There was a reason she kept that picture on her desk, and even her husband encouraged it; Daniel had gotten his own fair share of laughs about it.

“Yes,” Peggy said, her tone and smile equally practiced. “That really is-”

“The other guy!”

Howard and Peggy both jerked back in surprise.

It was Peggy who asked, “What?”

Bennett looked nervously between them as she caught their apprehension.

“In the elevator,” she explained. “I told you, there were two guys? The hippie bearded guy caught my eye, but I remember the other one. This was exactly his face, except he was older, and buffer…a _lot_ buffer.”

Then Bennett frowned as she squinted at the picture, taking a closer look. “Wait a minute, isn’t that…isn’t that supposed to be…” Her eyes slowly moved up to them. “Captain Rogers?”

“Yes,” Howard ground out.

Bennett swallowed and blurted out, “He said-”

But she cut herself off as she registered the cold anger on their face.

“What?” Peggy demanded, her fingers curling into a fist under Howard’s sore hand.

Despite her clear apprehension, Bennett finished, “I was trying to get a feel for them, so I asked him if he was new here.” She pointed at the picture of Steve, the real Steve that most of the world had long since forgotten. “This was the one who’d said, ‘not exactly’.”

The slam of Howard’s fist against the desk damn near undid Peggy’s work, but she didn’t even seem to care as the implications started to sink in.

“So not only did one manipulate Howard using his personal life,” Peggy explicated, standing upright and rolling her shoulders back, reminding Howard that decades of desk work hadn’t made her any _less_ of a soldier. “The other one impersonated Captain America to break into a top-secret SHIELD facility.”

Peggy turned on the spot, jaw set as she opened her mouth to start issuing orders-

Only to get cut off by the ringing of the phone on her desk. 

Rolling her eyes, she still picked up the receiver, the cord connecting it to the main body of the phone nearly snapping in her anger when she demanded, “What _now_?”

Her lips started to roll back into a snarl…only to loosen, as she blinked in surprise.

“Come again?”

Howard frowned, rubbing his abused hand with his free one as he also got to his own feet, watching Peggy tense up again, this time looking more determined than angry.

“…we’ll be right down,” Peggy said, putting the receiver back in the cradle. She looked up at Howard. “Hank just returned to his lab to find the missing Pym particles _replaced_.”

They only needed to share a look, before they both rounded the desk, nearly knocking Bennett over in their haste.

The elevator had never felt so slow in his life. He’d been grateful for the time of travel when ascending with ‘Potts’, but now it was almost perfectly mirrored by his frustration as he descended with Peggy.

The doors hadn’t even finished sliding open when Peggy shot through them, running past startled MP’s and confused scientists. Howard followed, and the rage on his face must’ve been visible enough for everyone to quiet down and get out of their way; soon, the hallway was filled with nothing save the clacking of her sensible heels and his own ragged breathing, as they raced to the Tesseract research room.

Peggy didn’t even pause when she managed to whirl on her way by one of the MP’s, managing to snag a handgun right out of his holster. Howard had no idea if the MP heard his apology as he ran past, but at the moment, merely followed her to the securest laboratory environment in the entirety of the United States of America.

They got there just in time to see the door of the safe close on the returned Tesseract…

…and revealing Steve standing behind it.

“What the _hell_?” Howard muttered, nearly running into a frozen Peggy as he stumbled to a halt.

Was that some kind of make-up, or some kind of mask? Dear god, whatever it was, it was insanely well done. Howard hadn’t seen Steve’s face outside of a movie reel or photograph in decades, but there was no mistaking the resolute jawline, those steadfast eyes, and that relentless determination.

“Shit,” the pretender swore, when he spotted them.

By God, he even had the _voice_ perfectly mimicked!

“How is he _doing_ that?” Howard muttered. That didn’t sound like a voice coming out of a mic or a speaker, but Steve’s real, actual voice-

“I don’t care,” Peggy snarled, raising her commandeered handgun and taking aim at the Steve impersonator. “Take off your mask, put your hands behind your head, and get down on your knees.” The fraud froze, until Peggy pointedly disabled the safety mechanism on the gun and ordered, “_Now._”

The man stepped back from the safe, raising his hands — but otherwise not listening to her. “I’m so sorry about this,” he started.

“Shut up, you imposter!” Howard shouted.

“How _dare you_ use his face like this?” Peggy demanded. Despite the tremble in her voice, her hands remained steady as she aimed the gun at the fake Steve.

Not-Steve grimaced.

“I’ll grant you, it’s effective,” Peggy continued. Howard couldn’t see her face, but he swore he could hear her teeth grinding even from several feet behind her. “But I’m afraid that’s your problem. What are you, Red Room? KGB?”

The man’s eyebrows rose. “Would anything I say actually matter?”

Peggy swallowed, but didn’t answer him. “Well, I’m sure your superiors would have been delighted to know you made it this far,” she said instead. “But _ne povezlo, svolach_, because there is no way in hell we’re letting them extract you.”

Howard’s Russian was spotty, and mostly technical, but even he recognized the _tough luck, scum_.

Strangely, it looked like the Russian spy did not.

That, or he was a _really_ committed fraud.

“I’m not a spy,” he offered, not sounding like even he believed she would listen to him.

“You’re just a fraud,” Peggy ground out. “And not even a very good one. What was your plan, pretend Steve survived the plane crash and just _hid_ for thirty years? Is that why you aged up your mask of him?”

For some reason, the man flinched at that.

“You heard the lady,” Howard said, stepping carefully forward to stand at Peggy’s side, while staying out of her way. Behind them, MPs must’ve cleared out the laboratory lobby, because he could hear organized footsteps falling into formation behind him, and the sound of guns cocking and taking aim at the intruder. “Mask off, hands up, knees down.”

The man smiled sadly.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, before his hands and entire body snapped forward, toward a broad briefcase on the ground between them.

The gunshot from Peggy’s sidearm nearly deafened Howard, and he crouched down, hands over his head, as he heard several MP’s take fire as well. He flinched at sounds that might have been bullets and might have been ricochets, yet didn’t move until the room was silent. Even then, it was only to move his head and drop his arms.

But when he looked up, it wasn’t to see either a bloodied, bullet-ridden body, or even a successful bullet-dodger running for his life.

Howard looked up to see…nothing.

The walls and furniture bore bullet holes, and some of the monitoring equipment was cracked, but the space was otherwise vacant. The imposter and his briefcase were just…_gone_.

He slowly rose to his feet, hearing the alarmed murmurs of the MPs as they started sweeping the lab.

“Not again.”

At Peggy’s quiet whimper, Howard looked to see her arms dropped to her side, handgun dangling from her fingertips as she stared into the empty space.

“What do you mean, ‘not again’?” Howard asked.

Peggy swallowed, and when she turned her head, Howard was stunned to see her eyes rimmed red, and a shining little tear trail down one of her cheeks.

“Remember what I said about drinking that terrible old wine in his memory, after the war?” He nodded. “Well…”


	5. Act II, Part 2 - Time Stone (Ancient One), New York Sanctum, 2012

Act II, Part 2: The Time Stone  
**The Ancient One**  
New York Sanctum  
**2012**

* * *

The Ancient One had seen the portal into space close with her very own eyes, watching aliens collapse all over the streets — but she did not see _how_ until Mordo and Wong were able to restart all of the latest devices to tune into the news.

“Thankfully, they closed it before any of the students could try to portal up there, themselves,” Mordo said, fiddling with something on one of the devices. Next to him, a screen went form one very large display of a single news program, to several small ones.

Her former students knew her well — one of them was already focused on the Hulk.

“That is…not like the man I spoke to on the roof,” she observed neutrally.

The man had been large and green, but otherwise nothing like the figure on the screen. Dr. Banner had been erudite and articulate, even when in large green flesh; this being on the screen was…most definitely _not_.

“Not bad,” Wong muttered, squinting at some numbers in the corner of one of the news shows. “Lower death toll than 9/11, even.”

“The Avengers seem to know what they’re doing,” Mordo said, sitting back in his chair and rubbing at his wrists. He’d been in a subway and holding up rubble during the invasion, to let civilians escape the tunnels.

“And there’s only six of them?” the Ancient One checked.

Mordo moved the smaller device around — she still didn’t understand why people called it a ‘mouse’ — and one of the quarters of the screen went from showing a newscast about a collapsed bank, to footage of the team on the bridge, standing back to back with each other as they prepared to fight off an army by themselves.

There was the Hulk — not the one from the future, but the present one, much angrier and less reasonable than the man she’d spoken to.

The Ancient One recognized Iron Man, from all his antics and one of her student’s suspicions. Stark had only walked by the student once, when the student had been part of an adoring crowd outside of Stark tower — but that was enough for the young sorcerer to feel the power in the man’s chest implant, and describe it as _familiar_.

And there stood the explanation for the strange rippling they’d felt a few days previous. Even if Asgardians were not quite the gods most people on Earth thought of them as, they were nonetheless in the Sanctum’s gaze whenever they set foot on this planet. At least Thor was fighting _for_ this planet.

On the other hand, the Ancient One couldn’t recognize the more professional-looking combatants. The news referred to them as Hawkeye, Black Widow, and-

“Didn’t Captain America die back in WWII?” Wong asked, with a confused frown.

The Ancient One remembered that day. She had only just moved from the London Sanctum to New York, and remembered the city in mourning at their boy from Brooklyn giving up his life for their collective sake.

“They’re saying he’s the real one,” Mordo said, blinking in surprise. “That SHIELD is saying the original Captain America had been _frozen_ for seventy years, and was only recently rediscovered.”

The Ancient One nodded; it was far from the strangest thing she’d heard of or encountered in her long life.

And it wasn’t difficult to believe, either, watching his face scrounge up in confusion as the Black Widow, a SHIELD agent, and a National Guardsmen appeared to attempt to demonstrate how to use a smartphone to him. The Ancient One didn’t blame him; Mordo tried to keep her up to date with modern technology, but even she frequently found herself feeling a little lost in it.

She mentally thought whether to try to contact the man, though, knowing just how much the world has changed since his ‘death’, though ultimately knew she wouldn’t.

However, the universe has a funny way of contradicting one at every turn, for that afternoon, Steve Rogers came to her.

Almost every New York sorcerer and student was out in the city, helping as much as they could while maintaining discretion. As such, the Sanctum was nearly empty when the Ancient One felt that there was someone waiting for her on the roof.

But when she got there, it wasn’t Dr. Banner from whom body that strange red and white armor was rescinding.

“Captain,” she greeted.

“Ma’am,” he returned, with a wry smile. He set down a hammer by his boots — the hammer she’d just seen careening all over the city and being used by the god of thunder to use the Chrysler Building as a giant lightning rod. Mjolnir looked smaller than she would have expected from her studies and the myths, yet simultaneously she could feel the vastness hidden within it.

Standing back upright, he held up a large and secure briefcase, and nodded to the tea table in the middle of the patio between them. “Mind if I…?”

She waved her arm in welcome, watching curiously as he opened it.

Then her eyebrows rose in shock when she saw what was in it.

She had seen many strange things in her very long life, many powerful and devastating things.

Few could rattle her as much as the sight of almost all the Infinity Stones resting innocently in a briefcase on her patio tea table.

Captain Rogers’ face was impassive, though, merely plucking the green one from its space in the middle of the ring of nestled stones. He held it out to her with a polite smile. “Bruce promised you we’d bring this back, I believe?”

Swallowing, she nodded, moving her fingers about her amulet to reopen it, in every plane of reality that it rested.

This man seemed to be almost as different from his past self as Doctor Banne had been, for he didn’t react to her blatant display of magic at all. He seemed familiar enough with it to know exactly when to let go, letting the Eye of Agamotto envelope the Time Stone and light up again as it closed back up.

Rogers nodded in satisfaction as the amulet fell back against her, resting in the security of her personal space. “I believe that’s all?” he asked, looking so very _tired_.

He reminded her of all the warriors she’s seen in her lifetimes, who’d won a war for someone else, only to lose to their own demons.

Once upon a time, he’d given up his life for cities full of people who barely knew him as more than a chapter of their history books or an old fictional character. He just defended this city again, and he and his comrades just _today_ fought off a hoard from the stars to protect this planet, and handled another Infinity Stone.

Physically, the gems likely barely weighed anything — yet watching him bring down the lid on the case of Infinity Stones, she wondered how heavy this burden truly was.

“Stay?” she invited him. “If you are traveling through time, then surely you can spare a few minutes. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”

He shook his head, locking the clasp on the case. “Thank you for the offer, but I really can’t stay.”

Her own polite smile tightened.

“I’m afraid that wasn’t actually a request,” she said, and she snapped her wrists forward and formed a mudra before he could react.

The familiar sensation of the folding of space engulfed her, as her own little portal wrapped around herself and the Captain, bringing them down to a parlor on the ground floor of the Sanctum, tea table and case of Infinity Stones and all.

However, she might have underestimated his reaction time — when space realigned itself down to the third dimension, the Captain had already braced himself, and that red and white armor wrapped back around him as he held up Mjolnir.

She held up her hands.

“Peace, Captain,” she said. “I have no designs on the rest of the Infinity Stones — I can’t imagine the true weight of your burden, and have no desire to take it upon myself.”

She moved her hands and the folds of reality again, so that the two metal patio chairs from the roof joined them.

“I just want to talk.”

His anger did not abate, but after a moment of scrutiny, he acquiesced with a nod. He sat with great reluctance, rested Mjolnir in his lap, and only barely blinked when two cups of steaming green tea appeared on the table between them.

There was something awfully incongruent about the sight of a man in futuristic armor, sitting on a patio chair in her Victorian era parlor, holding an ancient and mythical war hammer in his lap as he eyed the little cup of steaming tea with suspicion.

The Ancient One took her seat across from him, and wrapped her hands around the warm cup.

“You once gave up your life for this city,” she started. “And risked it so many times for the sake of this city, and our planet. I would be remiss, Captain, in letting you go without asking after _your_ wellbeing.”

The man huffed, shaking his head and, despite his suspicion, taking a tiny sip of the tea. He made a face — green tea was not to everyone’s taste, she supposed — and set it back down with a polite clatter of ceramic on metal.

“It wasn’t just the Time Stone,” he explained, waving his hand at the case between his feet. “We needed to get _all_ the stones from other times…and now I need to put them back. Two down, four more to go.”

She nodded, having already guessed as much — but that wasn’t her real question.

“And after that?” she prodded.

Rogers took a deep breath, bracing both his hands on the hammer in his lap.

“Get some rest,” he deflected. “Maybe forever.”

Time travel did not make him any less of a soldier, and she’d seen his face and this expression on so many warriors over the centuries…

And few warriors appreciated tact so much as straightforwardness.

“Are you going to commit suicide?” she asked bluntly.

His entire body tensed up, and his face went pale at he stared at her. She did not look away from his confused gaze, though she did take another sip of her tea.

“What…why would you ask that?” he whispered.

“I am a thousand years old, Captain,” she answered softly. “I’ve seen this look on your face, before — far too many times. It always ended the same way.”

Rogers looked down into his tea with a grimace. She must’ve struck a chord.

Though not necessarily the right one, for he shook his head and said, “Not exactly. I’m…” He gave her a tight, false smile, eyes shining with tears he held in. “I’ve always stood my ground and fought, but for once…for once, for the first time in my life…I think I’ll back down, and leave, and let someone else fight. Get some peace.”

Taking in his strange armor and the Infinity Stones, she simultaneously couldn’t fathom the breadth of the possibilities…yet ultimately, if he wasn’t going to kill himself, then really there was only one other way an old warrior would ever find permanent peace.

But retirement didn’t usually sound as close to death as Captain Rogers made it sound — even if it would be a retirement that required time-travel to be enacted.

“Do you really think you’ll find peace this way?” she challenged.

He shrugged. “I haven’t found it anywhere else. I gotta finish my last mission, but then…I need to hang on just a little longer, and try _something_.”

“You have given up your life already,” she said. “Are you really so ready to do it again, for a mere chance at peace?”

His forced, polite smile looked almost pained. “If that doesn’t work…I guess nothing will.” He looked between the ancient tea cup in her hand, and her face.

Her _forehead_.

“You’re a thousand years old,” he said, with a slight edge to his voice — how much did he know about her? About what she needed to do to live, to keep their planet protected? “Haven’t you ever wanted to just…_rest_?”

Pursing her lips, she nodded just the once. “More than you can imagine.”

The dark dimension saturated her soul, a stain from which she would _never_ recover. She could only hope to…what had he said? Hang on just a little longer?

She deflated, looking him in the eye.

Maintaining her own life with dark magics was already the height of hypocrisy, but even then, at least there was a reason and a specific goal, and her pursuit was in the service of her calling.

Just how much bigger of a hypocrite would she be, to deny a man his own death — or his facsimile of it — when she looked forward to her own, so much?

“I understand,” she admitted softly. She looked around the parlor, the patio set, and the pair of mystical burdens he carried, and shook her head to herself. “And I am sorry for holding you back, like this.”

He nodded, looking grateful to get to his feet. “Well, I can’t say I’m happy about it — but I do thank you for checking on me.”

With a wave of her hand, the parlor door opened, out into the vestibule of the Sanctum, and the path to the front door visible to them both.

He gave her a polite salute as he said, “Thank you for the tea.”

“Where will you be going now?”

For the first time this afternoon, she saw what might be a genuine smile on his face, with a little spark of mirth and mischief as he answered, much to her confusion, “Technically speaking, I’m about to get some shawarma.”


	6. Act II, Part 3 - Mind Stone (Sitwell), New York City, 2012

Act II, Part 3: The Mind Stone  
**Jasper Sitwell**  
New York City  
**2012**

* * *

“Hail HYDRA.”

Sitwell winced, and cursed himself for taking a step back from Secretary Pierce.

In the bustling lobby of Stark Tower, he couldn’t go far, but even that small motion was enough for Pierce — and the strike team behind him — to look at Sitwell in askance.

“Loki somehow knew to say the same thing, when he impersonated Cap,” Sitwell explained, keeping his voice as low as possible while still being heard in the chaos of the Stark Tower lobby. He warily eyed the cluster of superhumans just on the other end of the elaborate ground floor.

No one was sure exactly what happened, except that the Avengers had alerted everyone to Loki’s escape, but that Rogers had reported confronting him on the 14th floor — which was where ‘Cap’ had gotten _off_ the elevator with the case holding the Mind Staff.

As soon as the STRIKE team and Sitwell realized their mistake, they’d gone back up, and found themselves oddly grateful to Captain America for saving HYDRA’s ass in a bizarre moment. Loki had been half-conscious on the ground, the Tesseract on the ground between him and a stumbling Captain America, holding the mind staff in one hand — presumably just used on the trickster god — and that old Carter Compass in the other.

He hadn’t been pleased to realize that Loki had impersonated him to dupe the STRIKE team into handing over the space relics.

The only person who looked less pleased about that stood before Sitwell right now.

Pierce scowled. “And _you_ should have damn well known better than to think _Captain America_ could be one of us.”

“I know, I just — he _knew_. He literally said exactly the same phrase-!” Sitwell took a deep breath. “And I couldn’t tell him apart from the real Rogers. If I couldn’t tell apart the fake and real Rogers…?”

Pierce nodded in frustrated understanding. How could _any_ of them trust that whoever stood before them was really who they saw? As long as Loki was on Earth, they had to assume anyone could be an illusion.

“You were near the top of your class at the underground academy,” Pierce said, apparently willing to rely on personal memory to prove himself. How thorough could Loki’s research have been in less than a week on Earth? “Your instructors’ reports praised you for your studious habits and work ethic. They acknowledge that the positions you were ideal for, ‘middle management’, would not be glamorous, but _would_ be powerful. Of course, you were close friends with the top student of your year — can _you_ tell me their name?”

Sitwell smiled, already trusting that Pierce was real, but willing to prove his own identity. “Hale. She could more than keep up with the guys in combat, and kick their asses in class. Now a lieutenant-colonel in the Air Force, and on the steady track to general.”

With a satisfied nod, Pierce gestured for Agent Rollins to take the case with Loki’s scepter inside it, as the man himself strode off towards the door — through which Fury and his entourage had just entered.

Rumlow shook his head in embarrassment as Rollins and two of their own probies started checking over the case. “I can’t believe we fell for that.” Looking at Sitwell, he jerked his head toward the elevator and the upper floors and asked, “How was Cap when you found him? The real Cap?”

“Devastated,” Sitwell admitted. “Loki’s research was even more thorough than we thought. Cap wasn’t specific, but Loki made some personal references to Barnes and Carter that threw him off his game, enough for Loki to use the scepter on him.”

Rumlow whistled, low and impressed. “How personal are we talking?”

“I don’t know, but I’m seriously considering starting a betting pool on how long it’ll take Captain America to eat his gun,” Sitwell said. When the STRIKE team snickered, he idly started pondering whether they could get away with a betting spread on the HYDRA intra-net. If Cap committed suicide, SHIELD would never let the world know, but _they_ would know.

Still, those would all have to take place some other day, because right now, they had a failed alien invasion to clean up, and a literal team of honest-to-god superheroes to put up on a nice and distracting pedestal for the public.

He actually ended up losing track of the Avengers, for a bit — though in his defense, the most rational thing to do after Stark’s _heart attack_ would’ve been to get to a medical center as fast as possible.

Instead, a few hours later, when Fury sent Sitwell to retrieve the team, he found himself standing outside a shawarma joint in the middle of Manhattan. How was this place even still _open_?

Shaking his head with incredulity, Sitwell pushed through the door, unsurprised to find the restaurant almost completely empty — save for the largest table being surrounded by exhausted superheroes, powering through a large lunch in near silence. When the door drifted shut behind him, it closed out the noise of an entire city of anxious civilians, the hordes of first responders flooding the borough, and the noises of all the vehicles and machinery rolling into the city.

No wonder the Avengers were here; it was a bubble of peace in the midst of what was, for the moment, the most chaotic city on Earth.

Still, they all looked up when they saw him approach.

“Sorry, guys,” Sitwell said, almost meaning it. The restaurant seemed almost peaceful, compared to the chaos outside. “Fury wants you back for thorough medical exams and preliminary debrief.”

Agents Romanoff and Barton groaned, and Rogers hung his head in resignation.

“Yeah, about that,” Stark said, leaning forward and not noticing all the pita under his elbow as he pointed at Sitwell. Gesturing between himself, Banner, and Thor, he said, “I’m _pretty_ sure independent contractors do not need to-”

“Take it up with Fury,” Sitwell said, holding his hands up in innocence. “I was just sent here to get you guys.”

He took in their various countenances. Even the literal God of Thunder looked exhausted, and Banner was a step away from falling asleep in his hummus dip. Barton’s biceps were covered in bruises, and Romanoff looked like nothing so much as a rag doll, draped over her chair

And Captain America had an elbow resting on the table, his face behind held up by a still-gloved hand. Still, he lifted his head at Sitwell’s message.

Who knew Captain America could get five o’clock shadow?

The man gave Sitwell a half-aware nod, before turning his attention to the restaurant proprietor, sweeping up in the background.

“Really,” the Captain insisted, sounding like whatever he was about to say, he’d already said it several times before. “We can pay-”

“You just saved us all from an _alien invasion_,” the old man grumbled, in the disjointed accent of someone who’d immigrated to New York in their teens. “I wouldn’t have a restaurant or be alive if it weren’t for all o’ you.”

“Doesn’t mean you should stop living, or making a living,” Rogers challenged, and Sitwell really wanted to palm at his face. God, how stupid could have been to believe _this guy_ could be HYDRA? No way any of them would be dumb enough to turn down heroic appreciation, especially in something as small and simple as a free meal.

Rogers even reached into one of the pockets on his belt, and seriously, this guy carried his _wallet_ into battle?!

Or apparently not, since he seemed to realize he didn’t have it on him. Instead, the only thing he extracted was that old compass of his. Why the hell did he even have it? Sitwell knew he’d been briefed on modern GPS systems.

Rogers looked a little flummoxed, then winced as he must have realized they didn’t even have a way to pay for their food, anyway.

The old man smiled. “Tell you what, how ‘bouta picture?” he offered, as Rogers replaced that old compass back in his utility pocket. “It’ll mean a lot more to me than the cost of some food that insurance is probably gonna cover anyway.”

Sitwell swallowed down a frustrated groan, as a young man — teen? — who looked like the old man came out, along with a little girl and an old woman. Still, he smiled tightly and accepted the teenager’s smartphone, navigating to the camera app as the family stood behind the team, who all had tired smiles on their faces when Sitwell snapped a few photos.

He couldn’t wait for HYDRA to come into the light, so that he didn’t have to deal with nonsense like this ever again.

Still, he kept a formal smile on his face as he handed the phone back to the excited teenager, while the older couple bustled to the kitchen in the back. The team started to try and clean up after themselves, only for the teenager to wave them off. They probably would’ve tried to clean up anyway, if it weren’t for Sitwell holding the door open again for them, urging them out to get back to base ASAP.

Romanoff was efficient enough to lead the way, Barton and Thor right behind her. Stark and Banner took another moment to murmur some reassurances to the little girl, before following suit.

Rogers took the rear, which meant he was the one the proprietor’s wife called to a halt when she jogged back out of the kitchen — holding several plastic bags full of lidded styrofoam cups and boxes.

“You all work so hard,” she said, teary eyes belying her big smile as she shoved the handles into Rogers’ hands before he could protest. “Need full bellies.”

Rogers looked ready to protest, but he took one look at her face and kept his objections to himself, instead saying a sincere, “Thank you.”

She patted his head in absent affection, and Rogers’ face reminded Sitwell that this guy’s mother died when he was pretty damn young, at least if Sitwell was remembering his history correctly.

But finally, _finally_, Rogers turned and followed his team outside, and Sitwell was able to close the door on the restaurant.

He had an image to maintain, anyway, so as he and Rogers walked to catch up with the rest of their team, making their way back towards Stark Tower, Sitwell politely asked, “So how’d you like the food?”

Small talk hasn’t changed too much in the last seventy years, has it?

“Pretty good,” Steve answered — much to Sitwell’s surprise. He turned to see a small smile on Roger’s face as he took a sniff of the steam coming from one of the bags.

“Looking forward to what else the future has to offer?” Sitwell asked, half conforming to the expectations of small talk, and half genuinely curious.

“Yeah,” Rogers said, with a tired smile. “Granted, I’m not sure if I can be as enthusiastic about sushi as Tony and Natasha are.”

Rogers had looked devastated when they’d found him on the catwalk in Stark Tower, standing over Loki with fury on his face as he held up the mind staff to threaten the god into submission. So how was he so calm _now_?

“We’ll show you!”

They both turned to see Stark standing almost tall, despite the heart attack he’d had less than two hours ago. What the hell had Thor’s hammer _done_ for him, with that shock in the lobby?

Behind him, Romanoff nodded in agreement. “I’m pretty sure the best sushi place in New York isn’t even here in the red zone, we could probably go there for dinner.”

“Only if we’re still hungry,” Rogers insisted, striding forward with the bags of food. “Don’t want this to go to waste.”

“Is that enough?” Thor asked, genuinely curious. As Thor reached towards the offered bag of food with his free hand, Sitwell eyed the hammer dangling so loosely from Thor’s right hand. How could something that could light up the entire Chrysler building like a giant lighting rod, be used for something as delicate as a human heart?

The most aggravating part was how little the others seemed to care. If Barton was bothered by the paradoxical power right in front of him, he didn’t show it, instead mirroring Thor as he reached out for a bag, too.

The whole team looked ready to share Rogers’ load. On Rogers’ other side, Banner and Stark were also holding out their hands, ready to relieve Rogers of some of his burden.

Ahead of them, Romanoff was chuckling to herself as she watched her teammates reaching back towards Rogers.

“Hurry up, boys,” she cajoled, though her heart didn’t seem to be in it, impatience mostly feigned. “We’ve still got work to do.”

To Sitwell’s surprise, the team chuckled and snorted at that. As Rogers distributed the bags of food among them, Sitwell shook his head incredulously.

“Really?” he asked. “You already saved the world, and now you want to keep going?” He waved a frustrated hand towards the destruction just down the street, all the smoldering rubble and overturned cars awaiting any assistance that could come by, with the giant tail of a Leviathan carcass dangling off the side of a building over it all. “How are you gonna do that?”

The smile on Rogers’ face was small, but to Sitwell’s shock, _genuine_, as he looked around at his team. “Together,” he answered.

Sitwell sighed, watching as the team meandered off towards the Tower, following at a slightly slower pace. As soon as he was a safe distance behind them, he turned his comm device to the STRIKE channel.

“Someone tell Fury I’ve retrieved the Avengers, currently en route to the Tower,” Sitwell reported. “And I think we can call off that betting pool. Something tells me we’re not going to need it.”

“_Why not?_” Rollins asked.

Sitwell opened his mouth to answer — then did a double take when he saw one of the faces peering at the team from the mouth of an alley way.

“…uh, you’ve still got Loki in custody, right?” Sitwell asked.

“_Affirmative,_” Rumlow drawled. “_Why?_”

Because in an alley-way, Captain America — _another_ Captain America — watched the Avengers with an almost wistful expression. If the Avengers stepped back by only a few dozen yards, they would see him.

The Not Captain America — and Not Loki? — caught Sitwell’s eyes.

Then, he brought a single finger to his lips in a _shushing_ motion, winked, and vanished.


	7. Act II, Part 4 - Reality Stone (Frigga), Asgard, 2013

Act II, Part 4: The Reality Stone  
**Queen Frigga**  
Royal Palace of Asgard  
**2013**

* * *

The Einherjar came barreling into the antechamber just moments after Thor and that angry rabbit vanished before Frigga’s eyes, presumably back to their own time.

“Your Majesty,” the guard captain started.

“I am well,” she promised.

“Did you see-”

“It is no longer your concern.”

The guard captain — a young lad, newly promoted to his position just over a century ago — frowned. “Your Majesty, the intruders-”

“-Are gone.” She clasped her hands and stood with regal posture. “They were cosmic travelers, just a little lost. They have been sent on their way, back to where they intended to be.”

The young Einherjar captain wasn’t happy to hear this, but not enough to challenge his queen on it, either. With a conciliatory nod, he gestured for his men to go back to their stations.

With that taken care of, she strode toward the room Jane rested in, with all the grace and haste she could muster.

She paused in the doorway when she saw a stranger crouching over Jane’s unconscious form.

Well, almost a stranger.

“You are one of Thor’s new Midgardian friends?”

The stranger whirled around, and Frigga needed only one glance to confirm her suspicion.

“Yes,” she said, taking in that brightly colored uniform. “Thor spoke of you. You were lost to your people for quite some time, frozen in your underworld?” She cocked her head as she saw with more than just her eyes. “You…you are another man out of time?”

Steve Rogers winced. “You know, you’re not the first person from your family to call me that…and Thor said you’d recognized him.”

Her heart lightened for a moment. “How is he?”

Steve Rogers smiled, a little forced, but genuine nonetheless. “Well. I don’t know exactly what you said to him, ma’am, but he said he got some great advice from you and that he’s much happier and better off, now.”

She studied him for only a moment, then nodded once she realized he spoke the truth.

Then, she looked around the room, and at Jane’s sleeping form.

On the one hand, a stranger standing over her unconscious body and holding an ominous case bore poorly.

On the other hand, well — literally — Thor’s hammer hung loosely from the strap entangled between his fingers.

“What, exactly, are you here for?” Frigga asked.

“Just trying to put back everything we borrowed, your majesty,” he promised. He held out the hammer towards her. “I imagine you’ll know where this needs to go?”

She did, but she had no need to take it there, herself. After all, she knew her husband’s magic almost as well as her own.

Frigga stepped forward, and reached out — but she did not actually take the hammer from his grasp. Instead, she rested her fingertips over the handle, right over the runes inscribed there so many centuries ago.

“You know where you need to go,” she told Mjolnir, then stood back as the hammer slowly drifted upward — and out of Steve Rogers’ grasp.

For a moment, Mjolnir floated between them, before bouncing affectionately at Steve Rogers, then hurtling out of the window, and veering away in a large arc, right out of their sight.

Steve Rogers blinked out the window at it.

“…huh,” he muttered, shaking his head ruefully before turning back to Frigga.

“That’s one,” he said. “But not the only thing I need to return.”

Frigga frowned, looking between Steve Rogers, the case in his hand, and Jane…

…who, now that Frigga was looking closely, felt _different_ than just a few moments ago, when she’d been left to change her clothes.

“The Aether is gone?” she asked, eyes wide. How…?

Steve Rogers smiled, but this time it seemed sad.

It wasn’t hard to fit the puzzle pieces together.

“No,” Frigga started, shaking her head. “We were already trying to rid her of it-”

“And you _will_,” Steve Rogers promised, getting down on one knee and setting down the case. He turned his attention away from Frigga to start fiddling with its latches. “But she just needs to hold onto it for a little longer. After that, she’ll be able to get it out when she needs to and when Earth needs her to.”

He opened the case to reveal…

Frigga gasped, taking a step back, when she realized what she was looking it.

In a flimsy Midgardian case, on the floor between herself and her son’s love, lay half of the Infinity Stones.

Including the familiar and tempestuous one in the middle.

The Aether…no wonder its obelisk always felt so confusing; it had been an Infinity Stone all along.

And he wanted to put it back _in_ Jane.

“Is it…” she looked between Jane and the angry red stone; even as she watched, he pulled out the small contraption she’d just seen the angry rabbit holding. “Do we really need to?”

“It won’t be pleasant, but she will live,” Steve Rogers promised. “And by the end of it, she will not be harmed by the Aether, and she’ll come out of this mess unscathed.”

Frigga studied him, peering into his heart and listening to his voice with more than just her ears.

She was raised by witches, and just because she let things pass, did not mean they passed her by.

The depths of the darkness of the Aether certainly hadn’t, when it lashed out at Eir for trying to heal Jane in the first place.

But neither did Steve Rogers’ sincerity and honesty, now.

“If you must,” she said. “But while you may be a man out of time, somewhere on Midgard is a Steve Rogers that isn’t. If any harm befalls her-”

“You have my word,” Steve Rogers said, shoulders rolled back and chin out as he looked up at her. “Dr. Foster is a friend, if not a close one, and I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t important.”

At Frigga’s askance, he seemed to deflate, looking down at the collection of Infinity Stones. “…_really_ important,” he pointed out.

Pursing her lips, she finally nodded her head in reluctant acquiescence.

She clasped her hands tightly as she watched him use some strange device, like a tube with claws on it, to extract the stone from its place — the same device she’d seen the angry rabbit run up to Thor with.

What was going to happen in the future, that Thor would agree to something like this, despite his love for Jane?

Looking down at the remaining two Infinity Stones — and seeing the spaces in the case for more, for _all six_ — Frigga decided she would rather not know. Surely, it will be horrifying enough once she meets it, herself, staying her path in her own stream of time; no need to go through it twice by learning of it now.

Instead, she focused on the girl, wincing at the pressure of that clawed device against her neck.

It did not pierce her skin, yet her skin simmered black and red all the same as the Aether returned from whence the future had taken it.

“You are _sure_ she will be all right?” Frigga needlessly asked.

Steve Rogers nodded, placing that device back in the case. “She’ll save Earth, and be revered on our planet for her discoveries and new knowledge. Her papers on the dimensional studies are going to send tsunamis through Midgardian academia, and she’ll be gunning for her Nobel Prize before long.”

“The ‘Nobel Prize’ is…” Frigga tried to remember some of her son’s love-struck ramblings. “The Midgardian scholar’s honor, yes?”

“Yup,” Steve Rogers promised, as he finished locking his case. “Highest one on Earth.”

Frigga smiled. Midgardian scholastics were well beneath even Asgard’s students, but they were thriving and growing nonetheless. She looked forward to the day they could begin to match Asgard’s, and her soul relaxed at the knowledge that Jane Foster would be instrumental to its growth.

“Will Thor see this?” she asked. Steve Rogers looked almost sad as he nodded, but his answer was as true as his word. “Will _you_?”

Here, Steve Rogers hesitated.

Oh no.

“It’s a process,” Steve said finally. “They’re still wrapping it up in our time, but it is still on-going. Your son will see it, don’t worry. He and Jane had a rough patch, but they’re getting through it, and he’s still proud of her and happy for her.”

With a slow nod, Frigga considered the man before her.

“…but what about you?” she asked finally. “I can see you are traveling through time, and presumably will be putting all the stones back in their places. What will you do when you are finished?”

His smile looked closer to a grimace, and his attempt look reassuring failed spectacularly, this time.

“I’m just going to get some peace and rest,” he said.

She shook her head, and her step forward almost echoed in the marble halls of Jane’s guest chambers. “If it were that simple, you would not be struggling so much to answer me.”

The man shrugged, transferring the case to his left hand, and using his newly-freed right to start tapping at some device on his wrist. In a blink, white and red armor flashed over him and covered the traditional blue armor — could something so flimsy even be called armor? — he had been wearing before.

“Steve Rogers,” she asked, almost reaching out, but deciding not to touch him at the last moment. Being a friend of her son’s did not give them any kind of familiarity, not yet. “Rest is only eternal in death. You know that, right?”

He flinched.

Oh, _no_.

“What are you planning?” Frigga asked, slowly shaking her head. “I know the future will not be kind, I saw it in Thor and I see it in you. But eternal rest, or infinite peace…Steve Rogers, I implore you to think twice about giving up your life-”

“I’m not!” he blurted out.

She blinked, his outburst resonating through the room, though thankfully not waking Jane just yet.

“…are you sure about that?” she asked. “Even if it is not true death as we normally think of it, the only way to get eternal rest and infinite peace is to lose something, to give up your life.”

“Does it count as giving it up if you’re trading in one life for another?” Steve Rogers challenged.

“Yes.”

He didn’t seem to have expected such a simple answer.

She took a deep breath.

“I…cannot stop you,” she admitted, gaze flickering between his face, his case, and Jane. “But I can tell you that giving up your life, _a_ life, is the only way to get that which you say you seek. Are you sure it’s worth it?”

Once again, he hesitated.

_Miladies of the Norns,_ she prayed. _Open his heart and let him listen._

Steve Rogers took a deep breath and answered softly, “It has to be.”

Then he pressed down on the device on his wrist. A helmet formed around his head, and with a ripple of light and a feel little primitive beeps from his device, he vanished.

Praying that the Thor she’d just sent off into the future would not have to lose any more than he already has, Frigga knelt down to check on Jane.


	8. Act II, Part 5 - Power Stone (Starlord), Morag, 2014

Act II, Part 5: The Power Stone  
**Peter Quill**  
Morag  
**2014**

* * *

Peter Quill woke up knowing he’d hit his head when he’d slipped and fallen over a rock on Morag. The pounding headache was a clue, as was the dizziness when he tried to sit upright.

He didn’t realize how hard he must’ve hit his head until he managed to open his eyes.

“Captain America?”

With a smile as bright as the old movies he used to watch with Mom, Captain America nodded. “How’s your head?”

“Uh, not good?” Laying flat on the ground, Quill turned his head and squinted at the old Terran war hero currently crouching over him. “What…how are you here? What are you doing here?”

“You hit your head pretty hard, there.”

Quill blinked. “You’re…you’re a hallucination?”

Captain America shrugged, but didn’t answer. “You tell me, Starlord.”

This time, Quill snorted. “No one ever calls me that…so you must be a hallucination.”

Looking every inch the concerned WWII-era military leader, Captain America critically scanned him up and down, focusing especially on Quill’s head. When he reached up with tentative finger tips, he winced at the tender spot on his temple — but thankfully, no open wounds stung in his probing.

“How long are you here for?” Quill asked, pushing himself until he sat upright.

Leaning back on his ankles, Captain America answered, “Just until that minor swelling in your brain goes down.”

“Makes sense,” Quill said with a nod. “You’re a very helpful hallucination, you know that?”

Though when this weird living dream of Captain America managed to help Quill to his feet, he started to wonder just what kind of hallucination this was.

From his brief scouting the weeks before, Morag just looked like another empty rock, a planet whose peoples and civilizations had passed into memory and been forgotten before his own entire _species_ even _existed_. Honestly, he was only here himself on a lark — maybe find some forgotten antique that a historian or certain jewelers might pay good money for.

But if hallucinations could manifest with enough physicality to help Quill to his feet, there might be more to this planet than he originally thought. Hmm, maybe someone or something here had some kind of combined telepathy and telekinesis?

Whatever, he could report that to the Ravagers in passing and let one of Yondu’s scouts deal with figuring out _how_ this was happening. Right now, Quill just had to figure out why.

He started by asking.

‘Captain America’ shrugged. “You took a pretty hard hit to your head. I wanted to make sure you were okay, since it wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Quill frowned. “Wasn’t supposed to happen? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Captain America gave him a rueful smile, but didn’t answer.

“Okay, so you’re a hallucination, but I can touch you,” Quill said, making sure to poke him right in the middle of the star on his chest. “So not a _normal_ hallucination. Or, not a normal planet, but this kind of hallucination is normal on an abnormal planet. Not that I’m saying hallucinations are normal or I hallucinate normally, or that I have abnormal hallucinations.”

“Is there such a thing as a normal planet?” Captain America offered. Despite this, he obligingly turned when Quill kept poking at him from other directions, too. “Maybe this is all in your head, anyway, including the feeling of touching me.”

“That’s possible,” Quill speculated. “Though why you? Yondu or Kraglin would make sense, or maybe my mom if this system can generate tangible illusions of the dead.”

Strangely, Captain America flinched a little at that, but said nothing.

“Childhood heroes?” Captain America continued to offer, seeming a little relieved when Quill was done poking him. “Seems a good way to get you comfortable, especially someone who doesn’t trust lightly.”

“…then why are you _telling_ me that?” Quill asked. “Unless that’s the point, getting me comfortable by telling me what I would suspect anyway…so what _wouldn’t_ I suspect?”

The illusion shrugged again. “If I were a telepath trying to manipulate you, I don’t think I could help you either way with that.”

“True,” Quill said, scratching lightly at his jaw in thought. “Okay, so maybe this place tries to generate illusions of people or beings from youth that we’re comfortable with. Though why make you look older?”

The Captain America illusion blinked in surprise. “Older?”

“Yeah,” Quill said, waving his hand as if he were waving away the question. “Captain America was, what, in his twenties when he died? My mom showed me the old movies and everything. But you look older, like you’re in your late thirties or something…maybe it’s trying to keep you looking as close to my memory of you as possible while maintaining your position as someone older than me?”

The Captain…grimaced?

“Perhaps,” he offered, and hah! That had to be it, if this illusion seemed upset about it.

Downright sad, even — though Captain America was also trying to hide it.

“Well, Starlord,” the illusion — hallucination? — offered. “You seem to be doing okay, so I don’t think I need to stick around any longer.”

With a snort, Quill said, “_Definitely_ a hallucination, no one ever calls me Starlord, not since my mom died.”

Quill found himself caught by surprise when the hallucination flinched, trying to rattle his noggin for…what, exactly? Memories of mom? Of Captain America? Of Captain America’s mom?

…_oh_.

“Sorry,” he offered. “Didn’t your — or, uh, Captain America’s? — mom die when he was a kid, too?”

“You tell me,” the illusion offered, looking almost sick to his stomach.

Now it was Quill’s turn to shrug. “Hell if I remember. I haven’t read about you since I was a kid, and I haven’t been back to Earth since then.”

Captain America nodded as he started to turn away…then turned back.

“Why haven’t you?”

“…why haven’t I what?”

“Gone back home?”

With a shake of his head, Quill pointed in the general direction — though certainly not the correct location or exact direction! — of his ship. “My home’s that-a-way. I call her the Milano.”

“And can’t you use her to go back to Earth?” Captain America asked. Quill nodded, ready to dive right into all of his ship’s speeds and travel capabilities. “So why don’t you?”

He supposed he should’ve seen that question coming. “I mean…what’s left there for me?”

“Don’t you still have family there?” Captain America asked, curious.

Quill frowned. “I…suppose? But I mean, I’ve been gone so long.”

“You were _kidnapped_,” Captain America said, sounding as upset about that injustice as the real hero would. “Taken forcibly from everything you knew. Didn’t you want to go home?”

“At first, sure,” Quill answered, trying to understand where this was going. “And that sucks and believe me, I never let the guys who took me hear the end of it. But…I’ve changed a _lot_. Too much. My family back there…they’d have expected the kid who was taken from them, not the man I ended up becoming. I’m not the guy they knew anymore, I might as well be a stranger to them. If I went back, it would just hurt a lot, for everyone involved.”

Weirdly, the illusion looked about ready to cry. What the hell kind of planet was this? Was it some kind of mystic security system designed to deter thieves by distracting them?

Well, he supposed it was working — even knowing this Captain America was only a hallucination and wasn’t real, he wanted to make the illusion feel better.

“It’s not so bad,” he offered. “I’ve built up a life for myself. One of the best thieves in the Ravagers, now, I get girls all the time, and I’ve got one of the best ships in the fleet. And I’ve still got my mom’s music, and all my memories of my family. Why ruin it by going back? I’d just be ruining my memories with a lot of pain that won’t get me a new family, home, or life. I’m not…Earth is too small for me, now that I’m more Ravager than Terran.”

“You’d really turn your back on them like that?” Captain America asked. “You loved your mom!”

Quill frowned. “Watch it, buddy. Telepathic or not, you don’t know me, my mom, or my family. I loved my mom and she loved me. She wouldn’t have wanted me to throw away my life — my friends, my new family, and my home — just for some scraps of a life that was stolen from me, especially when it’s a life and a world that I can’t be a part of anymore, anyway.”

That…did not help.

At all.

Were Captain America’s eyes simmering with unshed tears, or was Quill’s hallucination just breaking down?

Still, the man swallowed, the quintessential WWII soldier from his mom’s favorite old movies.

“I guess you’re doing well,” he said with a nod. He sounded like he was telling Quill as much as himself.

The man pointed in the distance. “I’m not here to keep you from that, by the way. Doors are over there, and good luck, okay?”

Quill followed the direction he was pointing at, squinting through all the piles of rocks. There was nothing there…

…except as he looked, he realized that the rocks were more like worn down pillars, and in the distance, he could see a wall and the edges of a door.

“Hey, thanks!” he said. “You just saved me hours…of…looking…”

When Quill turned back, his hallucination of Captain America was gone, and he stood all alone on Morag.

“…huh.”

With a mental and literal shrug to himself, he continued on his way. If this turned out to be the wrong direction, he’d know it was a telepathic security system on this planet. If he got what he was looking for, then he’d know it was nothing more than a weird hallucination.

Though he did wonder whether he’d remembered everything about Captain America correctly. He had no plans to go to Earth, but that didn’t mean he was avoiding it, either. Maybe if he ever went back, he’d check up on some history books to see how accurate this hallucination was…


	9. Act II, Part 6 - Soul Stone (Red Skull), Vormir, 2014

Act II, Part 6: The Soul Stone  
**The Red Skull**  
Vormir  
**2014**

* * *

Only moments after the Son of Edith vanished into the waters of celestial existence, the Guardian of the Soul Stone heard footsteps approaching.

The Guardian hadn’t seen the man in what must have been at least eighty years, when he walked up the cliff of Vormir. How long has it been for _him_? When the Guardian looked at him and then Looked at him, he saw ice and gamma and Pym particles and the faint afterglow of the Soul Stone’s sisters.

“Steven, son of Sarah,” he greeted, trying to discern what he could as he spoke his usual-

“Johann, son of Martha.”

That stopped him short.

In large part, because it took him a moment to remember who Johann was.

How long has it been since anyone called him by his name?

Since anyone knew what his name was?

Or even knew he _had_ a name?

The Guardian’s surprise must have been evident.

“It’s only been about a decade and a half since I last read the SSR’s files on you,” the Son of Sarah continued.

“Is that how long it’s been for you?” The Guardian — Son of Martha? — asked. “For me, it has been much longer…so much longer. I’m surprised you remember.”

The Son of Sarah set down his case with a rueful chuckle. “Once upon a time, my only goal in life was to take you down.”

“Is that what you are here for, now?” the Guardian asked.

The Son of Sarah shook his head — just as the Guardian knew he would.

“I think we’ve both got bigger problems, now,” the Son of Sarah answered, going down on one knee to start opening the case.

“You are not wrong,” the Guardian said, reaching for everything he’d forgotten here. “My goals in HYDRA were so…_tiny_. Petty. So strange to think you and your comrades once devoted your lives to stopping something so utterly pointless to begin with.”

The Son of Sarah paused with the latch on his case, his hand drifting unconsciously to one of the pockets on his belt.

Ah.

No matter who or what else the man fooled, nothing could get past the Soul Stone — and even now, removed from her home, she told her Guardian everything she heard.

“Give my regards to Agent Carter.”

Steven startled, his hand jerking away from his belt and back to his case.

It’s been so long, the Son of Martha did not think on how he’d gotten here until now. Or rather, he’d had no reason to think of it. What had it mattered to him? The Space Stone had fallen to the bottom of the ocean on a planet hundreds of millions of miles away, and with it sunk the man who’d forced the Son of Martha to pick up the Tesseract with his bare hands.

Except now, he was _here_.

Just because he’d seen the vastness of the universe for himself, just because he’d abandoned his petty goals, just because he’d Guarded the Soul Stone for so long…

…that did not mean he’d forgotten how he’d come to be here — or who had put him here.

Standing back up, Soul Stone in hand and eyes rimmed red, Steven asked the Guardian, “How am I supposed to put this back? Nat had to…had to…”

The tears did not quite fall, though they might as well have. The Son of Martha felt humor for the first time in a long, _long_ while, watching Steven fail to speak.

“Is she…” Steven looked at the edge of the cliff. “Is she still there?”

The Guardian nodded, turning and approaching the ledge.

Just because the Soul Stone now rested in a stranger’s hand instead of her own pedestal in the Voids Above, did not make this any less her home. The Guardian only needed to extend his hand, and far down below, he could hear the clatter of metal on stone. The sound and device rose faster and faster, in time with Steven’s confused gait.

He could hear Steven’s footsteps behind him, then beside him, right as the Daughter of Ivan’s grappling-hook wire-winder landed in the Guardian’s hand. Not a drop of blood stained the red hour-glass nor the black circle.

But it _did_ stain the stone down below. Steven leaned over, and _finally_ the tears fell when he saw her.

The Guardian looked down at the device in his hand. Who made this?

Oh, yes, the Soul Stone knew. The Son of Howard had made this for her.

The Guardian wondered at the faint scent of burnt flesh that he smelled when he thought of the Son of Howard.

The Son of Martha marveled at one of the Space Stone’s many interim custodians having a family.

_Johann_ wondered what had gone through Howard Stark’s head when his son was born, after having seen the horrors and wonders of the war they’d both fought, and the wonders of the Space Stone.

“This wire was not long enough for the archer to reach the ground,” Johann said. “He was only human, and the height would kill him. But a super human, like you…you could reach her side with this.”

Captain Rogers looked up — then froze, when he saw Johann’s face.

“I imagine the blood is still warm,” Johann continued, with a grin as white and sharp as his face was red. “As is her body.”

“What…” Jaw clenched, Captain Rogers started to back away. “What are you-”

“The Everlasting Exchange works both ways, Captain Rogers,” Johann answered.

The man froze.

For a moment, Johann could swear that they stood on metal catwalks and railings from decades ago and millions of miles away, flames all around them, and Sergeant Barnes and Dr. Zola behind them.

The good Captain had almost the same expression on his face.

“Since you are putting the stone _back_, rather than taking it,” Johann continued, stepping away from the ledge. “You do not have to sacrifice someone _else’s_ life.”

Captain Rogers swallowed, trying and failing to curtail the horror written across his face. “D-Does this mean I have to kill myself?”

Johann let the depth of his decades and eons old rage furl across his face with his growing grin.

“No, Captain,” he said, shaking his head slowly to savor this moment. “You are returning it, so you do not have to sacrifice a life that _is_,” he repeated. “The Soul Stone will take a life that _could be_…as long as it is something you love.”

He could _see_ the moment Captain Rogers realized the depths of hate that Johann still had for him, that lifetimes on Vormir had not tempered.

In this nightmare of his life, this moment was a dream come true.

Captain Rogers couldn’t move when Johann reached out, hand hovering over the time-traveling device on his wrist. “You only have time and power for one more jump. Forward, or back — and neither of your teams will let you leave, once they have you back.”

The broken sob rung like music in Johann’s ears.

“The Howling Commandos cannot help you return to your new life,” Johann continued. “And the Avengers will not _let_ you return to your old one. Not after you put so much work into getting rid of all the branching timelines.”

“…n-no…”

Johann would savor that whimper for the rest of his life. Petty as it was, once upon a time, breaking Captain Rogers so thoroughly was one of his greatest desires.

The Soul Stone was so _good_ to him, giving him this little dream come true!

“You cannot complete your mission without a sacrifice,” the Red Skull intoned. “The Soul Stone will accept nothing else. And you cannot leave this mission undone.”

Johann knew he’d won when Captain America _cried_ right in front of him.

Best of all, he knew he could make this choice even harder for the Captain — and all the more devastating for it.

“You will not need to sacrifice _her_ life.”

Captain Rogers looked up, seeing Johann holding out the Daughter of Ivan’s device. “When you go back to the past you were robbed of, you could save her. Not just from this death, but from everything that ailed her. You could save so many people, could you not?” Captain Rogers flinched at the sharpness of Johann’s smile. “If, of course, you were willing to make a new branch in time…and you’ll get no peace fighting to save everyone from the torments you know awaits them, now would you?”

Rogers’ hands shook as he backed away, but Johann followed him — and stood over him when the Captain fell to his knees.

His hands shook so much, the Soul Stone…fell.

Some small part of the Guardian railed against the most powerful jewel in the universe dropping to the ground like a mere pebble. The rest of him marveled at the magnetism, the hate on Rogers’ face as he stared down at the arbiter of his fate.

Rogers didn’t even look up when he snatched the Black Widow’s device out of Johann’s hand.

Johann reveled in the sight. Captain America, on his knees a literal galaxy away from his home, the Soul Stone glowing on the rough stone before him. In one hand, he held that old compass — one Johann even _remembered_ from their war — with Agent Carter’s picture still in it. In his other hand, the red hourglass of Romanoff’s device almost glowed in the light of Vormir’s eternal sunset.

When Rogers attempted to reach for the stone with both hands, he seemed to falter and freeze with every moment, feeling that which Johann felt every time the Guardian attempted to snatch the stone for himself without a sacrifice.

The whimpering and crying died down, but Rogers’ body continued to shudder.

Captain Rogers hadn’t been the only one reading extensive intelligence files on his enemy, back in their quaint little war on Earth. Johann had done his fair share of reading on the man, this sentimental weakling that Abraham Erskine had chosen to be the next human god.

Did Rogers’ chest ache like the asthma he’d had until that fateful day he’d walked into Erskine’s lab? Now wouldn’t that be delightfully ironic, that mere words could reduce the Captain back to the pathetic excuse of a man he’d been before Erskine had given him that which was rightfully Johann’s-

“On your right, this time.”

Johann re-focused his attention on Rogers, wondering what this was about.

To his surprise, Rogers…started laughing?

“Choose, Captain. Will you revive the corpse of your old life, or resuscitate the dying body of your new one? ”

Rogers’ head jerked away, as if he’d been burned, but he turned his attention to his choices in front of him, in his hands.

After a moment, he ruefully shook his head, and an errant teardrop landed on the stone. The wet spot faded quickly into the ancient dust.

“She told me,” Steve said hoarsely. “On your right, this time.”

The Guardian didn’t scowl, no matter how much Johann wanted to. This decision could not be made easy, nor taken out of Rogers’ hands.

“Was she asking you to save her?” Johann challenged. “Or telling you _not_ to?”

Both devices sent up a puff of dust when Rogers collapsed forward, hunched over the Soul Stone on all fours, and barely keeping his weight on the heels of his palms to protect the two most precious things in his world, right now.

“You don’t know her,” Rogers said. Was he talking to Johann, or the stone? “Nat wouldn’t — we…we always wanted each other to be happy, to find peace.”

“And Agent Carter didn’t?”

Rogers scowled down at the stone, but still did not look up.

“They both did,” he murmured. Tear drops landed around the Soul Stone, reflecting amber gold for the moment before drying on the celestial rock. “We all wanted peace. Peggy got hers. Me, not so much. And Nat…” His shoulders shifted, as if glancing over the cliff’s edge, but his head did not move. “I guess found a moment of it, and…I guess that’s the only way I could ever have mine, now wouldn’t I? Just a goddamn _moment_, before…before everything goes to hell again, because you’re right. I hate to say this about _you_, Schmidt, but you’re right; I would have to fight to save everyone, and I…wouldn’t get any peace. Not really.”

When Rogers looked up, the tears cut shining tracks over his cheeks, simmering red under the distant glow of Vormir.

The tears did nothing to the determination and fury on his face. “You’re a real sick on of a bitch, you know that?”

For a moment, Johann _almost_ regretted not having eyebrows, anyway. “You never met Martha,” he said, in lieu of the expression he wished he could make.

Rogers rocked back on his heels, and casually scooped up the Soul Stone as he stood. The most powerful gem in the universe clattered against the Black Widow’s belt device.

Yet it was the compass Rogers faced, as he turned toward the sacrificial ledge.

“I love you,” he murmured, soft enough for the dead and the dead alone.

Rogers pulled the decades’ old newspaper clipping of Agent Carter’s face from inside the compass’ cracked glass cover. The little circle shattered on the stone where Rogers’ dropped it, uncaring, as he carefully placed the tiny, fragile picture inside one of the many pockets on his belt.

The Guardian knew he may very well live as long as the Soul Stone, be granted the immortality every being in the universe secretly sought after, and knew what a cold eternity it would be.

But the devastation on Rogers’ face when he placed the Soul Stone into the compass and closed it shut, would be the spark of warmth that carried Johann through every waking moment of it, for the rest of his unnatural life.

Johann did not even try to hide his smirk as Rogers rapidly started re-programming the device on his right arm, not loosening his grip on the belt device in his left hand as he typed and stepped forward, closer and closer to the ledge.

Right on the precipice of it, Rogers finished making whatever changes he needed to, and looked ready to do what the Soul Stone demanded of its current keeper.

He paused, looked back at Johann, at his victorious countenance in this vicious world. He opened his mouth, then closed it, shaking his head and struggling to say whatever was on his mind.

Finally, he settled on, “Go to hell, Schmidt.”

Johann waved an arm out towards the stone and celestial depths Rogers was about to dive into, and the void that waited above for the Soul Stone to come home.

“I am already here, Captain.”

The Son of Sarah snorted and turned away, not hiding his own pity. He clutched the closed compass to his heart one last time, pressed a kiss to its cover, then threw it with all his might towards its home.

It glinted in the starlight once, twice, thrice — then sunk into the clouds and ascended.

Not that the Son of Sarah noticed; he’d already taken a running leap off the ledge, aiming the Daughter of Ivan’s device at the rock below as he went and descending towards her body, and his future.

The Son of Martha peered over the edge to watch, as the wire extended further and further. Rogers’ booted feet slammed into the stone as he reached his now-free hand upward, to hold onto the device with both hands. The Guardian did not see what he pressed or did, but the grappling hook released from the stone, and all that wire raveled back into the device as Rogers fell and fell and _fell_, landing with a thud that the Guardian could feel all the way up here.

But he didn’t die; after all, the Soul Stone had already accepted his sacrifice.

He rolled with the force of his drop, until he wrapped around the freshly killed and revived body below.

One which gasped and heaved with her final breathe returned to her.

That was the only breath she took before Rogers slammed down on the device on his arm, and both orphaned warriors vanished into the future.


	10. Act III, Part 1 - Waking Up (Natasha), Midtown Metro General, 2023

Act III, Part 1: Waking Up  
**Natasha Romanoff**  
Metro General Hospital  
**2023**

* * *

Natasha never thought she could be so horrified to wake up and realize she was still alive.

The last thing she remembered was telling Clint _it’s okay_, because it _was_ okay, she was ready to give up her life if it meant saving the only family she’d ever really had.

But the soul stone required her life and if she had her life then _it didn’t_.

How could Clint have the Soul Stone if Natasha was _here_, waking up in…a hospital ward?

Her head was already turned to her side, and she could see…oh god, oh no, she could see almost the entire original team. Beside her lay Tony, unconscious and a fading bruise on his cheek, the rest of him obscured by bandages and a blanket.

In the low light beyond — there were many fluorescent lights, but almost all were off, was it the middle of the night? — she could see Clint in a bed on the other side of the room, a narrow monitoring strip wrapped around his head, an arm covered in bandages, and cuts all over his cheeks.

Even Bruce and _Thor_ were in here! She couldn’t see all of Bruce, his bed right across from hers, but she could see his foot. On Clint’s other side lay Thor, and the sight of the god of thunder in a human hospital bed just did not make any sense to Nat.

She tried to life her hand to pull up her blanket, to _do something_, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t feel anything-

“Nat?”

So she was able to move her head, at least. She did so, gaze sliding over a large TV in the corner, and following a pair of feet swing off the end of her bed, up long legs clad in dirty denim, towards the source of the voice.

“Ste-” The name choked on a cough, her mouth and throat both dryer than her days of dehydration training and her brief foray into a desert op sub-specialty.

By the time the coughs subsided, she felt a familiar brush of plastic on her cheek, and turned her head to latch onto the straw.

She took only one, two, three large gulps, just enough to talk.

Not that she even said anything when she looked up at Steve.

She didn’t have to.

The distress must’ve been written all over her face, because Steve cupped her other cheek with his free hand.

“It worked,” he promised. “It worked, and we won.”

“Then ‘ow m’I here?”

With a wet smile on his face, he set the cup down on the practical table by her bed side, before refocusing all that attention back onto her.

“Because that everlasting exchange works both ways,” he murmured. “I had to put the stones back after we were done, and when I put the soul stone back…I got _you_ back.”

She blinked, caught between wanting to believe him and not wanting to get her hopes up.

“And…_here_?” she added, tilting her head a little towards the rest of the ward, which looked nothing like their own facility at the compound.

“There was a…hitch,” Steve said, dropping back into his chair with a tired sigh. “A pretty big one that destroyed the compound. But that wasn’t until _after_ we Snapped and bringing everyone back. Look-”

He pointed to the TV, then frowned when he saw it off. Nat wanted to help him look for a remote, but she could barely wiggle her shoulders.

Steve found it soon enough, turning on the TV. It looked like some kind of security feed, the large screen split up into several smaller ones, a dozen sub-screens labeled with different cities, all showing…

…memorials to the Vanished?

Except each one was filled with people, in a way Natasha had never seen since their various unveilings to the public. The American cities were quieter in the night. _Los Angeles_ still had a dozen people gesturing wildly in the dark, and a strip of gray horizon in _New York_ portended dawn. But over in the daytime, _Tokyo_ was full of people, practically pulsing around the obelisks as they…as they…

“What are they _doing_?!” she asked, despite being able to see people defacing the memorials, herself. People were bashing into and breaking the memorials — small damages, but big enough to destroy all the names.

Despite the literally _global_ desecration, Steve grinned as he watched.

“People are striking their own names off the memorials,” he explained, hands rising from his lap. She looked down to see his hands wrapping around her own. Rather than think about how she couldn’t _feel_ it, she followed Steve’s gaze back to the TV.

In the Wakandan capital, she could see a veteran Dora Milaje use a laser to cross off a name from their elaborate stone trees. In _Chicago_, a man used a chisel to strike off two names, as three children clutched at his legs. He passed the chisel onto another family, while in _Johannesburg_, the crowd cheered at what looked like the _last_ name on a marble monolith fell into pieces and dust.

As she watched, _London_ transitioned into _Sydney_, and when she looked back at _New York_, it had been replaced with _Calcutta_.

All of them showed people grinning and laughing and cheering and crying tears of joy as little by little, they defaced and destroyed these memorials.

“It’s been almost a month,” Steve continued. “That hitch…Tony was in a coma, Bruce and Thor were bad enough to _need_ medical attention, and Clint…” He looked at her with a wry smile. “Checked himself out AMA, and apparently passed out on his first day home, so Laura made him come back.”

Natasha looked at him so sharply, she was pretty sure the force of it jostled her shoulder.

“_Laura_?!”

Steve nodded, eyes shining again.

“She brings the kids here first thing, every morning,” he said. “They’re crashing with Pepper — apparently, Morgan and Nate get along like a little house on fire.” He leaned in his chair to start digging into his pocket. “Here, Pepper sent me this…”

The terror Nat had felt upon waking up couldn’t hold a candle to the rush of relief she felt at the picture Steve showed her: Morgan and Nathaniel sharing chicken nuggets at Pepper’s dinner table.

Morgan hadn’t even been _born_, yet, when Thanos wiped out Clint’s family — and now, she was almost the same age as Nathaniel.

Steve swiped to the side, and Nat didn’t even try to contain her smile at the picture of herself, unconscious and with Lila and Cooper holding each of her hands. “From last week,” Steve said, tilting his phone so she could see it better. “When Clint was re-admitted.”

She swiped again, and there was Laura, lifting Morgan into a sleeping Bruce’s lap, the same overlarge bed she could see him in now. Another swipe, and Peter Parker was staring dumbfounded at-

“What happened to Tony’s arm?”

Nat felt how Peter looked, seeing an empty shoulder where Tony’s arm use to be.

“That hitch was Thanos,” Steve said, setting the phone down. “He captured Nebula in the past, and was able to follow us back into the present — his future — though thankfully, not until after Bruce had already snapped everyone back. Bruce, Tony, Clint, and Thor used the Gauntlet to disintegrate Thanos and his force, but that took its toll. Since Tony’s strictly human and he was the one _wearing_ the gauntlet…” He nodded over, and Nat turned her head again. She couldn’t see Tony’s other side, only the good one with his arm intact — but she could see what looked like burns over the horizon of his face.

Swallowing, she turned her head back at Steve. “You said the compound was destroyed?”

Steve sighed, pulling his phone back to tap and swipe and tap again, until he found what he was looking for, then turned the little screen back to her.

It actually took her a moment to recognize what she was looking at.

Then she gasped when she realized that the crater — full of dead bodies, crawling with weary living, and surrounded by rubble — was an aerial view of the compound.

Of her home.

Nat pulled her gaze away from the literal smoking ruins of her home, looking back at the TV.

Just in time to see a burst of color and light over the San Francisco skyline.

Steve scoffed as he set the phone down again.

“All that public humiliation, and absolutely no one is listening to that stupid fireworks safety PSA I made,” he grumbled.

She burst out laughing, and Steve didn’t say a word about her tears.

In Moscow, a bunch of babushkas were crying as they hugged each other, all talking at once and not seeming to notice the group of soldiers trying to edge around them to reach the monument. Despite them blocking the way, even the soldiers seemed happy at the sight. In the sub-screen next to it, the singing group of old men in Bogota could have singing _at_ them, despite being on the other side of the planet and possibly not even aware of the live-stream.

“Tony’s been in and out of his coma,” Steve said, and this time Nat didn’t even care when she could see but not feel his hands wrapping around her own. “And…well, I guess that cooped up here in the hospital, we all needed the reminder.” He looked out over the ward. “Do you want me to wake them?”

Nat shook her head — she could already feel her eyelids starting to droop, she could see it was almost morning anyway, and…

…and she was overwhelmed. That wasn’t something she wanted to admit, and thankfully, Steve didn’t make her.

“Tell me what else has been happening,” she asked instead, tilting her nose towards the TV screen. The people dancing in _Nairobi_ transitioned into a party in _Auckland_.

Steve understood what she was really asking. He pressed her knuckles to his face for a moment, then nodded, putting her hands back in her lap before he leaned back in his chair.

“The whole world is hooked up, and that’s despite all the telecomm crashes due to the sudden re-doubling of the population, recycled phone numbers, all of that,” Steve started reporting.

Nat closed her eyes on the TV, the last thing she saw being a curly-haired teenager in _New York_ chiseling off her name from one of the monoliths.

“Pepper’s already starting working with Queens’ ma — or I guess May Parker is his aunt? — to help everyone who was displaced or rendered homeless,” Steve continued. “T’Challa’s mother is spearheading reconnection efforts in not just their country, but most of the ones around it, too. I don’t know how the Gauntlet works, but it seems to have brought everyone back to the nearest safe space, rather than exactly where they were, because the airports were flooded with people. Hell, New Asgard suddenly doubled up, despite them being in space when Thanos first decimated everyone. Congress is currently in emergency session and having possibly the most productive time of its life as they sort out the ‘two presidents’ problem, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people _happy_ to be in traffic in the major cities…”

Nat was sure he continued for a while, because he was a good man like that.

Still, she fell into sleep, and for the first time in five years, she couldn’t wait to wake up again.

~*~

Because the next time she did, it wasn’t with terror, but with joy.

Because before she even opened her eyes, she heard Lila hissing at Cooper, “Keep it down!”, right over Nat’s head.

Nat had long since last track of the how often she’d heard this over her sleeping form, back when they’d sneak into her guest room or when she’d dozed off on Clint’s couch. Back then, she usually liked to feign sleep for just a few minutes, to startle them as much as possible.

But she’d certainly kept track of all the years without them, so this time, she just opened her eyes right away.

She still startled them.

“Aunt Nat?” Lila’s eyes widened. “You’re awake!

“You’re alive,” Nat breathed out in awe. She only tore her gaze away to look at Cooper on her other side.

Right as he turned away from her — to shout across the hospital ward, “Aunt Nat’s awake!”

She flinched at the commotion as what sounded like two dozen different voices started talking at once — and when she turned to look, she realized her estimate may not have been far off.

Laura stood by Clint’s bed, Nathaniel in his father’s lap.

“About damn time,” Clint called out. The bandages around his head and his shining eyes softened his words, as did his nod up at Laura.

The previously quiet and cavernous room was loud and _full_. Either the Avengers were making the local hospital staff miserable on a daily basis, or Steve had told everyone about Nat waking up in the middle of the night.

Why else would Peter Parker be there to bound over to her bed side? “Miss Romanoff! Ohmigod, I didn’t think I’d ever get to talk to you in person, and everyone’s been disagreeing on whether or not you’d wake up! You would _not_ believe everything that’s been going on-”

“She damn well better believe it!” Bucky Barnes yelled from his seat in the chair by Bruce’s bed.

The yelling was necessary to be heard over Valkyrie bickering with Thor, who was trying to tug off that simmering silk wrapped all over his side.

Across from him, Tony was whining about his beard and pleading with a woman who looked like Peter for a proper shaving kit. May Parker and Pepper both laughed as they shook their heads, and Tony groaned, telling Morgan what traitors they were.

Wanda, with a quiet nod from Clint and Laura, lifted up Nathaniel and settled the squirming toddler onto her hip, carrying him across the crowded ward. In Nat’s peripheral vision, Steve started fussing with something, and then the bed that Nat was laying on started to rise, until she was sitting almost upright with its support.

“There’s my littlest double agent,” Nat murmured, smiling at Nathaniel as he reached for her when they approached her bed — and at Wanda, the protégé Nat hadn’t seen in five years.

Nat quickly realized a problem — she couldn’t hug her godson. She could barely wiggle her shoulders, let alone lift up her arm, and she couldn’t _feel _him.

Sam — _Sam!_ — seemed to just _appear_ at Wanda’s side, murmuring something into her ear.

“Aunt Natasha cannot hug you herself, Nathaniel,” Wanda said to the toddler. “So you will do it for her.”

“How?” her namesake asked.

Wanda set him down on the bed, and gently nudged his head, until Nathaniel was laying against her.

Natasha couldn’t feel his little body against hers, his heartbeat in her hand, or his breath against her own — but she could feel his hairs brushing her chin and neck as he cuddled into her. With a faint, red glow, both of Nat’s hands moved — not of her own accord, but of Wanda’s, and for now, that was enough. Nat watched as they wrapped around Nathaniel, pulling him close, and sighed as she shut her eyes.

This was so much more than okay, and Nat had never been happier to wake up in her life.

She’d spent her childhood having a manufactured disdain for family and domestic life indoctrinated into her, had her capacity to start her own family on her own terms taken from her, and spent her adulthood observing it from the outside without understanding.

Right now, she’d never felt more at home.

Nat wasn’t sure whether Nate was being oddly obliging or if she’d just managed to wake up in time for his naptime schedule — what it had been before the Snap? Whatever it was now? — but soon enough, his wiggling died down and was replaced by snoring.

With him snuggled into her side, and Wanda perched on the end of Nat’s bed, Nat just…_watched_. She’d always been happy to do so. Once upon a time, she’d regularly volunteered to bartend for Tony’s silly parties so she could be part of the fun while still have enough room to just sit back and watch.

And then for five years, Tony’d _had_ no parties. Even when he married Pepper, they’d just asked Happy to stand in as their official witness in a clerk’s office when they filled out the paperwork, but held no festivities nor even an actual wedding.

Now, everyone was back and the whole world seemed to be celebrating. Nat couldn’t bartend anymore, but she could still watch.

All around, voices were talking and talking over and talking with each other as those who’d survived the Snap did their best to fill in everyone who hadn’t. Ranging from the few movies and music that had come out, the political events, the aftermath and the changes in the school and legal systems, and how much chaos the world was in from the suddenly necessary reconciliation.

Everyone was _back_.

(Almost everyone. But — and? — according to Peter, speaking to her from his spot sitting on the ceiling above her head, Shuri felt guilty about not having been able to separate Vision from the Mind Stone fast enough…but she’d gotten far enough that she wasn’t ruling out the possibility of bringing him back.)

Nat almost felt sorry for the hospital’s staff if this was what this ward was like, every day, filled to the brim with jubilant superheroes. At the very least, Pepper had arranged for this entire floor to be reserved just for them, and the floor was mostly filled with Cho and her medical team, or security — through the doors, Nat glimpsed regular recursions of SHIELD agents and Einherjar, each human-Asgardian pair grinning when they’d walk by, yet not deviating or pausing in their patrol.

It didn’t take long for this to devolve into an actual, honest to god party. Tony somehow got some music to play on some portable speakers, thankfully kept to reasonable volumes through Bruce and Sam’s combined efforts, with Laura making sure none of his music was anything the four-year-olds shouldn’t be hearing. She wasn’t sure how Pepper arranged for cake and a catered lunch to come into the hospital, but she had — though the actual residents of the beds were limited in what they could eat. Natasha didn’t even mind Lila spoon-feeding her, just so happy that she was there to do it.

In the middle of it all, Steve remained a solitary spot of melancholy at Natasha’s bedside.

Not that it was obvious. He smiled, and he responded to anyone addressing him, and even laughed at some of the kids’ antics.

But if no one else addressed him, Steve either kept his gaze fixated on the TV — still showing all the memorials around the world quickly crumbling — or lost in his own thoughts.

It didn’t take her long to start realizing why.

_‘I had to put the stones back after we were done,’_ he’d said. _‘And when I put the soul stone back…I got you back.’_

But how? If getting the sacrificed life were really as simple as putting the Soul Stone back after using it, then was it even really a sacrifice?

Had it really been so easy for Steve to get her back?

The realization hit her right as everyone was debating whether or not they could get away with a dinner party as well, but Nat didn’t ask as soon as she realized it.

There was a reason the Red Room had called them Black Widows: spiders knew how to _wait_.

So she did.

She kept one eye on Steve and the rest on her strange, overlarge, and overjoyed family, through their snacks and through their celebrations and through Helen Cho reluctantly but sternly wielding her medical authority to start sending everyone home so the original Avengers could get some rest.

That, in and of itself, became a tear-filled process. Global — _galactic_ — decimation and the five years’ difference gave a whole new meaning to ‘separation anxiety’. Even Natasha cried when the Barton family finally left. Hell, it looked like half the room left at once, with Pepper housing so many. The world was wracked with chaos due to all the homes whose ownership and residency had shifted over the five years, not to mention most of the people in this room normally lived all over the world.

But Helen Cho had been the Avengers’ primary doctor for years _for a reason_, and this was one of them. It may have taken hours, but she did eventually manage to empty out the Avengers’ hospital ward. Even she left, eventually, with stern orders to them all to get enough sleep.

Only Steve stayed behind. This ward was designed for six beds, and despite not being physically injured, Steve took the last one. Ostensibly, it was for lack of anywhere better to go and not wanting to further crowd Pepper and Tony’s already-crowded house.

In practice…Nat didn’t miss the careful looks the rest of the boys shared when Steve poked through his dinner — the same hospital food as the rest of them, in odd solidarity. Around them, the rest of the boys chatted in quiet, pleasantly exhausted tones about their plans, now that everyone was back. As Tony and Clint threw around playdate plans for their kids, Natasha kept her eyes on Steve.

She had waited all day, she’d considered, she’s parsed through everything she’d ever remembered hearing about space magic in the last five years of worldwide depression and hell, and in the last five weeks of planning this mission.

“Steve,” she finally asked, her soft voice still grabbing the attention of the whole team. “How _did_ you get me back?”

He frowned. “I told you-”

“You only told me that you put the Soul Stone back,” Nat said. “And that you got me back. But Steve…I may not understand space magic very well, but if it were really that easy, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.”

The entire room fell silent as the implications started to sink in, Steve looked cornered and heartbroken in equal measures.

“Besides,” she added. “I read your history, and I recognized the guardian. Celestial ascension or not, I have a hard time believing the Red Skull would let you off so lightly.”

Tony and Natasha’s heart monitors beeped along, filling the silence with nothing but the quiet reminders that they were all still alive. Steve looked between them, and one by one, the Avengers gave him an encouraging nod, demanding the truth without saying a word.

Steve sighed, a long and pained sound.

“Since I was only putting the stone back, I could sacrifice a…a _potential_ life,” Steve said. “And you’re right, that _was_ Schmidt, and he was…still himself, in some ways. I don’t know how he knew, or if it was some connection to the Soul Stone, but it knew…”

He looked around the room, at the rest of the boys, apologetically. “It knew that when I’d set out to put the stones back in their places in time, I wasn’t planning on coming back.”

The room had been kept warm by default, and the body heat of the dozens of visitors hadn’t quite dissipated, but Natasha felt her blood run cold anyway.

“…you were going to kill yourself?” she asked, in a horrified whisper.

Steve shook his head, so hard he could’ve snapped his helmet off.

“No, no, I wasn’t…almost the opposite, though I guess the same end result: I was going to…to go back, and live out my life with Peggy. The one I was supposed to have.”

His pronouncement rung through empty room, and it must’ve been a dozen beeps of half the team’s hearts before Bruce finally said, “Steve, that would’ve…you…”

Steve looked old and lost, remorseful yet regretful, lines in his face that Nat was sure hadn’t been there when they’d first met on the old Helicarrier’s deck all those years ago. His hair didn’t technically have gray in it, but it sometimes appeared to in certain lights, with the increasing disparities in the shades of blond.

They didn’t all look it, but they had all gotten so _old_.

She tried to imagine this older Steve reuniting with Peggy Carter at her prime and in her youth, expecting the young man she’d lost in the war.

Natasha couldn’t come up with anything that wouldn’t eventually end in a nightmare for Steve.

Oh, sure, they would _start_ out happy, delighted to have each other back again in any way, shape, or form.

But either Steve would have to spend the rest of his life lying to her, pretending to be that young man from almost a decade and a half ago…or, he would have to tell Peggy the truth, and she’d have to live with Steve being such a different man from the one she’d fallen in love with, and knowing that the young man she _did_ fall in love with was still out there in the ice somewhere.

Either way, it would eventually devolve into heartbreak on at least one of their parts, if not both.

…well, there was still that _start_, that moment at the beginning where they could be jubilant.

“Bruce,” Natasha asked, inching her head around to face the Hulk. “Are there enough Pym particles left for one more trip to the past?”

Bruce’s eyes went wide, as he misunderstood her.

“No!” he protested. “Steve, I’m sorry, but we can’t let you go back. We can’t let you create a new branch in the timeline, and even if there was a way to permanently hide your existence from the world, could you really keep quiet as HYDRA abused Bucky into the Winter Soldier? Keep your mouth shut through the Cold or Vietnam or Gulf Wars? Can you really _not_ prevent 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination or the alien invasions? Can you really…”

He trailed off as he saw Nat shake her head as violently as she could manage.

“Our plan didn’t work because we changed the past,” she said. “It worked because we were able to come back to the present with something we took from the past. What if the thing Steve could bring back…is closure?”


	11. Act III, Part 2 - First and Last Dance (Peggy), Carter Living Room, 1946

Act III, Part 2: First and Last Dance  
**Peggy Carter**  
Carter Living Room  
**1946**

* * *

_“You'll never know how many dreams…”_

Kitty Kallen’s voice and the trumpet accompaniment drowned out the faint whir of the record spinning on the turn table, save the occasional scratching of the vinyl.

_“…I dreamed about you…”_

Dancing with Steve — Steve’s ghost? Spirit? — in her living room, Peggy almost lost herself in the sound of the music.

Almost.

_“…Or just how empty…”_

Peggy truly lost herself in the feeling of holding Steve in her arms. Wanting to savor the moment, she pressed her cheek against his chest, over his heart, and closed her eyes on the glare from the setting sun that shone in through her linen curtains.

The two of them swayed slowly to the music, their feet sinking into the plush post-war rug on her hardwood floor.

_“…They all seemed without you…”_

He rested his cheek against her forehead, her Victory curls flattening under the corner of his lips, and she could smell the hints of the terrible wine she’d just shared with him. And it _was_ him, and on his breath; it was too strong to be coming from the half empty bottle and entirely empty crystal glasses behind her.

_“…So kiss me once then kiss me twice…”_

She’d never believed in ghosts before, and she wasn’t sure if she was starting to, now. How could he be a ghost? Steve’s spirit was so very physical and _real_, enough to share that Bordeaux Rosé 1943 they’d promised to save for after the war.

At barely three years old, the wine wasn’t much better than the freshly brewed bottled they’d stumbled across and drank on the front lines, but with Steve in her arms, Peggy couldn’t care less.

_“…Then kiss me once again…”_

Sharing it with Steve, after she’d already lost him, made it the best damn wine she’d ever had in her life.

They held each other so tight, she could feel his powerful heartbeat throughout her own chest, even through the rayon wool of her dress and his stiff shirt.

_“…It's been a long, long time…”_

The late summer afternoon wrapped around them, save for the faint breeze from the ceiling fan creaking ‘round and ‘round above them. The warmth seemed to bolster her Parisian perfume, as Steve turned his head to bury his face in her hair.

_“…Long, long time.”_

The music faded, until the sound of the record spinning and scratching filled the room. Neither opening his eyes nor letting go of her, Steve’s swaying came to a slow and gentle respite, as he simply held Peggy close.

She never wanted his embrace to end.

The moment was broken by car roaring by outside. Before the war, she could never have imagined a suburb having so many. Now, every family seemed to have one — she’d even seen a house with _two_! The quiet, contented amazement she’d felt for that sight wilted in time with the engine’s roar fading as the car presumably drove off, and Steve pulled away, his strange cologne dwindling with him.

Opening her eyes as she held onto his hands, she couldn’t contain the brief giggle at the sight. She’d filled her china cabinet not with china, but with weapons and tools and SSR curios, and the occasional USO merchandise; the little toy Captain America shield seemed to perch right over his ear.

Looking up at him, she could almost believe he was an angel. If she forgot her own cheap chandelier hanging behind him, she could pretend the light around his head was a halo, that the glow was something holy and otherworldly, not her own tungsten filament bulbs and linen lampshades.

“Stay,” she pleaded, cursing the waver in her voice, and the lump in her throat.

Steve smiled, eyes bright with both happiness and unshed tears. “I can’t, Peggy.”

“Why _not_?” she demanded, squeezing his hands. How could a ghost be so warm? She could hear him breathe, in time with the ticking from the mechanical banjo clock on her wall.

“I never thought this would be something I could say of a world without you,” Steve murmured, bringing her hands up to his face, pressing his lips to the back of her fingers. His lips and breath were warm and alive and _real_, yet his words… “But I have somewhere else I gotta be.”

“Don’t…” Peggy shook her head, and for once couldn’t care less about the tears welling up in her eyes, about someone else _seeing_ them. If Steve were really dead, then what did it matter? “You can’t…this is the first time I’ve…” She blinked, some tears finally spilling over. “I can’t lose you again!”

Steve looked ready to cry. Peggy didn’t understand what was happening or why, but she knew Steve and she knew he was in her arms, and she knew she couldn’t let him go.

“Stay,” she said, not hiding her grief or her pain.

For a moment, just a moment, Steve almost seemed to start to nod, to listen to her and stay and be with her like they’d both earned and damn well deserved after their war.

But then he took a deep, bracing breath, and shook his head instead.

“You’ll see me again,” Steve promised, wrapping both her hands in one of his own, bringing the other to cup her face. His thumb wiped away the single tear falling down her cheek. “But it’ll be a long, _long_ time from now.”

Chest shuddering, she begged, “How long?”

He wrapped both his hands around hers again; she could feel the drop of wetness on her knuckled from the tear he’d just wiped off her face.

“You’ve got a life ahead of you, and you can’t waste it waiting for Howard to find me,” Steve said, shaking his head slowly and sadly. “He won’t.”

Her breaths heaved as she tried and failed to _not_ cry, his strange cologne fading into the ever-present background scent of her Soir de Paris and leftover cigarette smoke.

“I’m not gonna be there to march forward and live on,” Steve said. “So I need you to do it for me.”

She didn’t even say _no_ so much as mouth it out, over and over again, not wanting that to be true.

But the only way for that to not be true, is if _this_ moment weren’t true, weren’t real, and that meant she didn’t have Steve in front of her and she couldn’t-

Steve leaned forward and pulled her close, his hand wrapping around her head as he pressed his lips to her forehead.

“I love you,” he said, so low that she didn’t so much _hear_ his words as feel them, reverberating through their chests. She closed her eyes to breathe him in again. “And I always will.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered, voice hoarse but strong. “And I will never forget you.”

Then he let her go. She shuddered in place as his lips pulled away, as his warmth faded from her skin, and when his hands released her own.

Looking up at him again, her feet stood rooted in place, as if trapped by her deep rug, as he stepped away from her.

He was already here; why did he have to leave?

Why was she letting him?

Steve backed away, then stepped to the side and moved past her. She tried to reach out for him, to grab onto him and hold him here, but he’d already reached her door, pulling it open with a sound she swore was a sob.

He walked out on her, right into the setting sun. For a moment, the late afternoon light glared through the windows and shone off her brass door handle, blinding her and filling her vision with white light.

When she blinked the light away, her doorway was empty, and Steve was gone.


	12. Act III, Part 3 - I Can Do This All Day (Steve), Stark Cabin, 2023

Act III, Part 3: I Can Do This All Day  
**Steve Rogers**  
Stark Cabin Lakeside  
**2023**

* * *

Seven seconds and seventy years later, Steve could still hear Kitty Kallen crooning about a _long, long time_ as he reappeared on the time-travel platform.

For a moment, all Steve saw through the tears were a dozen brightly colored blobs in the green forest; he wasn’t sure where he was or who was with him. He blinked hard and wiped them away, and his team solidified in front of him. The newer Avengers already started bustling about, packing up the disparate parts of the time-machine — but the old team only had eyes for Steve.

In the fancy wheelchair that Tony built for her, Nat looked up at Steve with a soft, encouraging smile. “How was it?”

Steve swallowed, scrubbing at his face one last time. “It was beautiful.”

“I’m glad,” Nat said. Some of her shortened red hair fell forward around her face, but she sharply jerked her head to the side to get them to move back. “But even more glad that you’re back. Just because I can’t move, doesn’t mean I can’t show you a few moves.”

Behind Nat, Bruce stood. With his right arm in the black sling, he used his left to wave Steve off the platform.

Around them, Bucky started collecting the now-disconnected cords into a neat loop around his shoulders.

Steve’s foot barely brushed the ground before he was engulfed in a one-armed hug by Thor. Even with only one arm — the other wrapped in an elegant Asgardian healing wrap instead of a sling — the man’s hugs almost crushed Steve. He leaned into the partial embrace, anyway.

“You okay, Capsicle?” Tony asked. When Shuri bumped into him, carrying a shoe-box full of hand-written notes to the platform, the empty sleeve of Tony’s jacket bounced off his right hip. He stepped out of her way, not needing to move far with his entire right arm missing.

“I will be,” Steve promised, as Thor finally released him.

“That’s what matters,” Clint said. His sling matched Bruce’s, though obviously much smaller and on his left side. He leaned against Nat’s wheelchair as they watched Peter Parker and Valkyrie lift up the entire time-machine console, not breaking a sweat as they loaded it onto the platform.

“You know,” Steve said, turning a bit on the spot and looking around to face all the _other_ Avengers standing around. “You guys didn’t really need to wait for me. This seems like overkill.”

Sam raised an amused eyebrow. “Who says we’re here for you?”

Keeping an eye on his sister, T’Challa added: “_I_ was told we’re here for a wedding.”

“It’s a ‘vow-renewal’,” Steve explained. He blinked in confusion at the sudden scattering of leaves around the clearing, and looked up to see Doctor Strange’s cloak lazily weaving through the trees. He shook his head as he brushed some of the leaves off his shoulder. “So it’s like having another wedding without getting married again.”

“Did Stark really need to do it _today_, though?” Lang asked, gesturing towards the increasingly crowded platform that Shuri was painstakingly waving some kind of scanner over, pointedly ignoring whatever Peter was pointing to.

Tony glanced sidelong at Steve, his gaze flickering to Steve’s wet cheeks before looking him in the eye.

Steve had needed something definitive to look forward to, Natasha wanted the whole team to be there for him, and Tony…was already getting everyone together in one place, anyway. Steve had never spotted a drop of resentment at the suggestion of this happening on the morning of his ‘wedding’. If anything, he’d been worried about Tony being upset about this happening on the same day as his ‘wedding’.

So Steve nodded in reassurance, and Tony smiled in kind.

“Yeah,” Tony said, with confidence Steve hadn’t seen in years. “Today seemed right.”

Steve turned his attention back to the quantum tunnel just in time to see Peter topple off the platform and land in the dirt with a grunt and a beleaguered sigh. Shuri snickered as she helped him back to his feet.

Still kneeling on the platform to secure all the detritus to it, the new Queen of Asgard buried her face in her palm, shaking her head at the two teenagers.

“Just as well,” Valkyrie said. “All of New Asgard’s basically hungover from the celebrations, anyway.”

“And to think, we still haven’t had the coronation,” Thor added, his grin almost as bright as the sun. His expression gleamed when Valkyrie rolled her eyes.

“I hope we’re invited?” Steve asked.

“We better be,” Shuri said, accepting the tablet Scott held out to her as he hopped onto the platform. “I already have an outfit picked out.”

T’Challa looked very long-suffering — and a bit betrayed, once he caught sight of Steve’s amused smile. Steve knew they were all just trying to cheer him up, but it was working, and for quite possibly the first time in his life, he didn’t feel the need to fight it.

The various voices started to blur around Steve. Scott and Shuri were bickering about something far beyond Steve’s understanding as they looked between their tablets, while poor Sam tried to mediate between them. Wanda and Peter set down more boxes full of all the notes from the project — ranging from data drives to print-outs to literal napkin notes. Bucky pointedly ignored the chaos around him as he loaded up the last of the power cables onto the platform, and Valkyrie and Carol finished strapping everything down.

With everyone working together, it was only a few more moments before Nebula nodded, and Rhodes declared, “All right, everything is loaded up and locked down.”

Tony and Clint clambered onto the platform, Tony punching something into the console now resting on it while Clint placed some device right in the middle of the pile of _stuff_.

On the ground, Natasha remained the closest to the platform — this little reiteration of the last thing on Earth she’d ever stood on.

Behind Steve, he could feel Bruce and Thor. On his left, Bruce’s new height meant that even with his arm in a sling, his arm came up almost to Steve’s head, and Steve could feel those limp, burnt fingers brush over his shoulder. Steve felt something whisper over his other elbow, and turned to see Thor on his right, the wrapped arm brushing Steve’s.

“Hurry up, boys!” Nat called out, smiling as she heckled Tony and Clint. “We’ve got work to do.”

“Like _what_?” Tony protested, as Clint placing the doodad on the little time machine mountain. “I’m getting married, today. I don’t have any work to do between now and waiting for Pepper to walk up the aisle.”

Clint, the only other (original) Avenger who’d ever been married, snorted in derision. “Oh, is that what you think, Stark?”

Despite their bickering, Clint still waited until Tony was done with the console, so that he could help Tony down the few steps. Tony grumbled about how he wasn’t an old man _seriously, Steve is twice my age_, but he looped his good arm through Clint’s nonetheless. He’d taken the brunt of the Gauntlet’s energy surge, and recovery was a long road ahead of him.

They all had a long road in front of them. Tony had enough pride to scoff at Steve’s offer of an arm, but he bumped his empty shoulder against Steve anyway, leaning back a bit against Bruce.

Steve reached out towards Clint, brushing his sling. “And you…?”

“Are fine,” Clint said, then frowned. “_Am_ fine?” He shrugged.

Still, he also accepted Steve and Thor’s silent support, not shrugging _off_ Steve’s hand as he turned around, facing the platform without standing in Thor’s face.

Facing the last thing that could take him back home to Peggy, Steve stood surrounded by his friends.

“And in _five_…” Natasha started. “Four…three…two…_one_…”

The machine lit up, like he’d grown familiar with…but differently, this time, since everything was now coming from within. Red and blue lights seemed to battle for brightness, an almost incandescent purple overtaking the machine as its functions all inversed and worked perfectly at the same time.

For a moment, Steve wanted to stop this. He could still smell Peggy’s _Soir de Paris_ on his collar, hear her song in his head, and he didn’t know if he could survive losing those for good. Steve almost reached outward, to stop this destruction-

But his arms brushed up against the rest of the guys’ when he moved, and he knew he couldn’t.

With a crackle and the buzz of the quantum tunnel reaching into this reality, the entire clearing filled with light, before it vanished — and the time machine with it.

The time machine, the notes, the data, the information, every scrap that could even _potentially_ be used to recreate it — anything that could let Steve see Peggy again, anything that could give someone else access to the Infinity Stones, to the past, to mind-boggling power that no one should have and no one would have ever again — vanished into the mid-morning light.

Only the dents and divots in the ground where it had stood remained.

As the ‘boys’ held tight onto Steve, Natasha turned her head to look at him. Steve nodded once in reassurance.

“Welp, that’s taken care of, then,” Tony said, his shoulder jerking in a motion familiar to Steve. He looked forward to Tony building himself a cybernetic arm — Shuri already had ideas from her year of studying Bucky’s — so that he could clap and grandstand like he used to. For now, Steve nudged his shoulder back against Tony’s, before they split it.

None of his team were subtle about checking up on Steve, but Steve waved them off anyway.

Over by the lakeside, Morgan and Nathaniel were chasing after Doctor Strange’s cloak by the waves, while the man himself helped Happy and Laura set up the giant grills. Mrs. Parker seemed to have her hands full getting Pepper to just sit back and relax for once. The Avengers’ families dotted the lakeside, setting up tables and placing out condiments for the pre-wedding barbecue, or bickering over the music.

The Avengers, themselves, all made sure to pass by Steve, patting his shoulder and giving him one-armed hugs, before wandering off to the awaiting party.

Sam and Bucky held back for a moment, and Steve didn’t even try to feign confusion or surprise when Sam asked, “So how are you really holding up?”

For once, Steve didn’t try to front him. “As well as I can be, which may not be very well right now, but will be.”

“You sure you don’t wanna talk about it?” Sam asked. “We can take off, chat somewhere quiet.”

Steve shook his head. “No, I don’t think I will.”

Despite their superficial animosity towards each other, Sam and Bucky seemed to be in agreement when it came to Steve’s welfare, so Steve wasn’t surprised by Sam glancing at Bucky.

“Buck,” Steve added softly. “I _will_ be fine, I promise.”

Looking him over once, and then once more again, Bucky finally nodded. Jerking his head towards the tables by the shore, he said, “Let’s go, before they eat all the hot dogs.”

“I think Tony Stark will have enough hot dogs to go around,” Sam said, but followed him anyway.

The Avengers old and new wandered off, until only Steve and Natasha remained.

Gesturing again towards her wheelchair, Steve said, “Need a hand?”

“I don’t _need_ it,” Natasha said. Then she smiled and added, “But I certainly wouldn’t mind it, either.”

Steve nodded, taking the handles of her wheelchair and pushing forward. Despite everything he knew this chair was capable of, they chose the long way, meandering over the smoother path through the trees.

“Do you regret it?” she asked. “Not going back?”

“I don’t regret saving you, if that’s what you’re asking-”

“I’m not.”

Steve sighed. “That last trip…I could’ve stayed. She wanted me to stay, I wanted to stay, and how well could any of you have forced me to come back?” He shook his head. “But I’m here, aren’t I?”

“And we’re all glad for it,” Natasha said, idly glancing around to take in the peaceful environment the Starks had surrounded themselves with. “Grab my hand, since I can’t reach up.”

Steve obliged, pausing to pick it up and squeeze, like she used to do for him.

“Are you ready for _this_?” she asked, looking down her paralyzed body, then over the serene forest floor and to the cheerful party bubbling on the lakeshore. “For…nothing?”

Blinking in surprise, Steve carefully placed her hand back where it was before, and resumed pushing her forward. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean just that: no war, no fight, no leading support groups or rogue operations or running from the law. Just…sitting back, relaxing, and doing _nothing_.” She moved her head enough to glance up at him through the corner of her eye. “After spending so long fight, can you really do that?”

“…y’know what? Yeah, I think I can.” He smiled, and her grin could’ve outshone the sun. “I can do this all day.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please remember to show your love to the artist!
> 
> All comments are loved, good-faith concrit is welcome, and if you are on Tumblr or Discord, you can come find me [here](https://nyxelestia.tumblr.com/discord).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [ART: On Your Right by Nyxelestia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21459865) by [brokenEisenglas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenEisenglas/pseuds/brokenEisenglas)


End file.
